Profit and performance boost of straight, wavy, and combined minichannel heat sinks by counter-current pattern
Introduction
Along with an unbroken trend in miniaturizing electronic devices, the main challenge coming up is to prevent excessive heat load that can cause detrimental effects on the electronic components [1]. Consequently, effective improvement in cooling system design to maintain the temperature of the devices at a reasonable operating level is essential [2,3]. In the recent years, one of most favorable and promising systems utilized to tailor this issue is the heat sinks. To date, several studies in the open literature have been addressed to optimize the heat removal process of heat sinks both experimentally and numerically.
Heat sinks with simple structure seem not to be helpful under high heat flux conditions, but the performance of them can be improved through altering flow path pattern to non-straight structure. For instance, the wavy channel structure have advantages over straight passages in that they achieve much better performance than the straight ones, which origins from the generation of secondary flow and fluid mixing [4]. Employing wavy design instead of straight geometry was first proposed by Sui et al. [5]. They also examined the effects of geometrical parameters, including wave amplitude, wavelength, at Reynolds numbers of 300–800 on the forced convection flow inside a wavy microchannel heat sink [6]. Their experimental results indicated that by increasing the wave amplitude and/or decreasing the wave-length, the thermal performance possessed higher values. Since then, many researchers have devoted themselves to evaluating the thermal performance of wavy heat sinks [7], [8], [9], [10], [11], [12], having reported the similar results. Lin et al. [13] introduced a modified design of wavy heat sink with altering the wavelength or amplitude along the flow direction. It was found that the thermal resistance decreases with an increment in amplitude or with decrement in wavelength relative to the conventional wavy design. Zhu et al. [14] performed a numerical simulation that focused on the thermal performance of the left-right and up-down wavy heat sinks. The outcomes of study revealed the superiority of the up-down wavy design in terms of thermal performance.
The flow behavior and heat transfer of a microchannel heat sink were discussed by Mohammed et al. [15] through performing three-dimensional simulation in which the influence of wave shape, including zigzag, curvy, and step, was analyzed. The results revealed that zigzag configuration had the best thermal performance among other wall shapes. Khoshvaght-Aliabadi et al. [16,17] compared three corrugated heat sinks both numerically and experimentally, and reported that the heat transfer performance was improved effectively in a non-straight shapes, owing to the formation of swirl flows, and chaotic advection of boundary layer, as compared to conventional cases. Moreover, the sinusoidal geometry achieved the highest overall performance, and the triangular and trapezoidal heat sinks were in the next. Chiam et al. [18] introduced a new wavy micro-channel with secondary branches being employed to the peaks and the troughs. They pointed out that there was a notable improvement in the heat transfer performance, in spite of being accompanied with pressure drop penalties. Following this work, a novel structure of zigzag heat sink had been considered by Khoshvaght-Aliabadi et al. [19] in which the effect of three kinds of non-flat nooks in both negative and positive directions were examined. The considered designs exhibited better temperature uniformity compared to flat zigzag MHS. In addition, when the negatively directed nooks were adopted, the recirculation strength and size were considerable.
According to the literature survey, most of previous researches have been done on the influence of the geometrical variables of wavy heat sinks on the hydrothermal performance, and it can be found that none of them focused on the combination of wavy and straight patterns to generate a modified heat sink. Also, to the authors' best knowledge, the comparison between co- and counter-current patterns in the wavy heat sinks are rather scare. Only Shen et al. [20] evaluated both co- and counter-current patterns arrangements of the wavy double-layer heat sink. Accordingly, there is still room for further investigations. The novelty of present study is as follows. Firstly, four arrangements of sinusoidal wavy and straight structure of minichannels according Fig. 1 has been designed. Furthermore, the hydrodynamic and thermal transport characteristics of the considered designs are investigated under both co- and counter-current conditions.
Section snippets
Geometry of studied models
Fig. 1(a) shows a water-cooled minichannel heat sink (MCHS) with a straight structure of minichannels. It consists of several minichannels and walls as well as two headers, one to distribute the water in the minichannels and the other to collect the water from the minichannels known as distributor and collector, respectively. It can be seen that the length (lm), width (wm), and depth (dm) of the minichannels are the general geometrical factors of the MCHS. These factors keep same for all
Experimental study
A schematic of the experimental test setup with its instruments is presented in Fig. 2. The MCHS is cooled by water as coolant which is restored in a cube vessel. A thermostatic bath is employed to maintain the temperature of water inside the vessel at 293 K, which is the temperature of coolant at the entrance of the MCHS. Before the water passes through the MCHS, a 5 μm filter is used to eliminate possible solid particles. The water flows through the loop using a centrifugal pump, and a set of
Numerical study
The models provided in Fig. 1(b), i.e. S-S-S, S-W-S, W-S-W, and W-W-W, are the studied cases in the numerical simulations. Fig. 3(a) shows the computational area for the S-S-S model as a sample. As shown in the figure, two designs of the flow condition are examined, including co- and counter-current. In the co-current design, the water flows in the same direction through both the minichannels, and in the counter-current design, it flows in the opposite direction. Similar to the real MCHS,
Validation study
In order to confirm the validity of results reported in this study, a two-step validation study is performed. In the first-step, the results obtained from the numerical simulations are compared with the data recorded from the experimental tests. The range of Reynolds number considered in this step corresponds exactly to that reported in the results and discussion section, i.e. 100 ≤ Re ≤ 900. As shown in Fig. 5(a), there is a good agreement between the experimental data and the numerical
Results and discussion
As mentioned in the previous sections, the performance of co- and counter-current MCHS with straight, wavy, and combined structures is evaluated on the purpose of controlling the temperature rise and its uniformity of electromechanical systems. In this section, a comparative study is carried out, and the effects of fluid velocity and Reynolds number are discussed by using both qualitative and quantitative results.
Conclusions
The performance of straight (S-S-S) and wavy (W-W-W) minichannel heat sinks (MCHSs) is evaluated and compared to the combined (S-W-S and W-S-W) cases. Both co- and counter-current patterns are studied to propose the best model having the lowest values of the maximum temperature different and total thermal resistance. Before proceeding to numerical simulations, an experimental study is performed for a straight MCHS to create the required data for validation. After the experiments and
Declaration of competing interest
The authors declared that there is no conflict of interest.
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2023, Engineering Analysis with Boundary ElementsCitation Excerpt :As a consequence, higher flow mixing and Nu are obtained for the symmetric configuration as compared to the parallel type. Aliabadi and Feizabadi [26] studied the hydrothermal specifications of the straight, wavy, and combined heat sinks with co-current and counter-current patterns for water flow with Re=100-900. The results showed that the counter-current pattern provides a lower heatsink temperature (18.5 K for Re=100) over the co-current pattern.