Experimental study on the performance of a tree-shaped mini-channel liquid cooling heat sink

Abstract

Characteristic of high heat dissipation of semiconductor electronic products require the cooling systems operating throughout the year, which inevitably causes a huge energy consumption. Although the small-scale channel (i.e., mini-channel or microchannel) liquid cooling heat sink has been applied in semiconductor electronic products cooling accounting for its advantages of outstanding heat exchange performance and easy integration, the existing small-scale channel liquid cooling heat sink still has problems of uneven temperature distribution and excessive pressure loss. In this paper, a Tree-shaped mini-channel liquid cooling heat sink (TSMLCHS) with four levels branches is proposed. The models for determining the dimension of each branch are established. The effect of flowrates on the heat transfer efficiency and pressure loss for the proposed TSMLCHS is discussed in detail under different heat fluxes and flowrates. The experimental results show that the TSMLCHS is suitable for applying on the electronic chip cooling since the average surface temperature is only 23.8 °C–66.6 °C when the heat flux is varied from 5 W/cm2 to 8 W/cm2.

Keywords

• Liquid cooling
• Mini-channel
• Tree-shaped
• Heat sink