History, Advances, and Challenges in Liquid Flow and Flow Boiling Heat Transfer in Microchannels: A Critical Review

Abstract

As the scale of devices becomes small, thermal control and heat dissipation from these devices can be effectively accomplished through the implementation of microchannel passages. The small passages provide a high surface area to volume ratio that enables higher heat transfer rates. High performance microchannel heat exchangers are also attractive in applications where space and/or weight constraints dictate the size of a heat exchanger or where performance enhancement is desired. This survey article provides a historical perspective of the progress made in understanding the underlying mechanisms in single-phase liquid flow and two-phase flow boiling processes and their use in high heat flux removal applications. Future research directions for (i) further enhancing the single-phase heat transfer performance, and (ii) enabling practical implementation of flow boiling in microchannel heat exchangers, are outlined.

Entropy generation and optimization of laminar convective heat transfer and fluid flow in a microchannel with staggered arrays of pin fin structure with tip clearance

“…More significantly in engineering practice, critical deficits, e.g. water hammer effect caused by abrupt bubble clogging, the surface superheat from local dry out, lowered critical heat flux, etc., were observed [5]. On the other hand, the achievable heat flux of single phase convection, which provides more stable performance, with passive structure for intensification is catching up [5].…”

A synthetic layout optimization of discrete heat sources flush mounted on a laminar flow cooled flat plate based on the constructal law

“…hydrogen supplying for fuel cell [1], gas turbine cooling [2], high-power LED cooling [3,4]. For flow boiling, the heat transfer is mechanistically intertwined with interfacial effect [5], flow pattern [6] and so on and is therefore more vulnerable to drawbacks such as bubble clogging and local superheating [7]. Whereas convective heat transfer, with either active [8,9] or passive [10] enhancement, is gaining more attention with a catching-up heat flux.…”

Flow boiling heat transfer of HFE-7000 in nanowire-coated microchannels

“…The continuous increase of power density in the next generation electronic devices calls for high heat flux microfluidiccooling technologies. Utilizing the latent heat evaporation, higher critical heat flux (CHF) [4,5] and heat transfer coefficient [2] could be achieved in flow boiling than in single-phase liquid cooling. To meet the requirements of safety 4 and reliability, dielectric fluids [5][6][7][8][9][10] instead of water are usually preferred in thermal management of electric/electronic devices because their dielectricity property can protect circuits from being short and electrical discharge in case of coolant leakage.…”

“…Two-phase transport such as flow boiling in microchannels becomes a topic of great interest in the last decades [1][2][3]. The continuous increase of power density in the next generation electronic devices calls for high heat flux microfluidiccooling technologies.…”