Experimental and numerical investigation on thermal and hydraulic performance of novel serpentine minichannel heat sink for liquid CPU cooling

Abstract

A novel serpentine design for minichannel heat sink is investigated experimentally and numerically to enhance thermal performance of the heat sink for liquid CPU cooling. The heat sink is fabricated from aluminum and is located in a plexiglass container. The channels have square cross section with deep and width of 2 mm. Mass flow rate and inlet temperature effect on the performance of the maze serpentine heat sink are studied. Five different mass flow rate varies between 0.0017 kg/s and 0.0087 kg/s and three different inlet temperature (15°C, 20°C and 25 °C) is investigated. Pure water is used as the coolant. The results indicate that by changing the minichannel design from straight to the proposed mazed shape geometry, baseplate temperature decreases 11.2% and Nusselt number increases 4.2 times in the maximum mass flow rate. Thermal resistance is decreased in the novel maze serpentine minichannel heat sink and by increasing mass flow rate the difference get larger so that maximum convective thermal resistance difference for and the novel maze serpentine minichannel is 54% that is observed in the lowest mass flow rate. Also, higher thermal performance is achieved in the maze serpentine minichannel heat sink.

Keywords

• Minichannel
• Heat sink
• Serpentine
• Maze
• CPU cooling
• Heat transfer