Numerical Investigation of Fluid Flow and Heat Transfer Characteristics in Parallel Flow Single Layer Microchannels

Authors

Department of Mechanical Engineering,Sharif University of Technology

Abstract

Abstract. Heat generation from Very Large-Scale Integrated (VLSI) circuits increases with the
development of high-density integrated circuit technology. One of the ecient techniques is liquid
cooling by using a microchannel heat sink. Numerical simulations on the microchannel heat sink in the
literature are mainly two dimensional. The purpose of the present study is to develop a three-dimensional
procedure to investigate
ow and conjugate heat transfer in the microchannel heat sink for electronic
packaging applications. A nite volume numerical code with a multigrid technique, based on an additive
correction multigrid (AC-MG) scheme, which is a high-performance solver, is developed to solve the steady
incompressible laminar Navier-Stokes (N-S) equations over a colocated Cartesian grid arrangement. The
results show that the thermophysical properties of the liquid can essentially in
uence both the
ow and
heat transfer in the microchannel heat sink. Comparison of the numerical results with other published
numerical results and experimental data, available in the literature for Reynolds numbers less than 200,
indicates that the assumption of hydrodynamically fully developed laminar
ow is valid. The accuracy of
the prediction has been veri ed by comparing the results obtained here with the numerical and analytical
results from the open literature which showed a good agreement. The detailed temperature and heat
ux
distributions, as well as the average and bulk heat transfer characteristics, are reported and discussed.
The analysis provides a unique fundamental insight into the complex heat
ow pattern established in the
channel due to combined convection-conduction e ects in the three-dimensional setting.

Keywords