Flow Boiling of Deionized Water in Ultrahigh-Aspect-Ratio Microchannel Heat Sink

Abstract

Microchannel heat sinks have attracted much attention due to its superiority of removing high heat flux with a very small size, which recently have been applied in the electronic cooling. The flow boiling of deionized water in the ultrahigh-aspect-ratio copper microchannels was experimentally investigated in this work. The heat sink consists of 20 rectangular straight microchannels (5000μm × 200μm) with the hydraulic diameter of 385 μm and the aspect ratio of 25. The experiment was conducted with the heat flux range of 39.7–1368 kW/m2 and the mass flow range of 21.3–41.6 kg/(m2·s) (the inlet temperature of 30°C). The flow patterns in the ultrahigh-aspect-ratio microchannels were captured using the visualization technique and four flow regimes (bubbly flow, slug flow, churn flow and annual flow) were clearly observed. The nucleate boiling sites increase significantly in the depth direction on the large-area side wall at bubbly flow. An obvious delay for flow patterns transformation in the upper regions compared with the lower region of microchannel was found. The bubble sliding was observed with a large sliding distance compared to the conventional low-aspect-ratio microchannels, which leads to an enhanced the heat transfer. It shows that the higher effective heat flux and the lower pressure drop were achieved in ultrahighaspect-ratio microchannel due to its special flow patterns in the channel and large surface area in the limited volume.