Experimental demonstration of a tailored-width microchannel heat exchanger configuration for uniform wall temperature

Abstract

In this work, an experimental study of a novel microfabricated heat sink configuration that tends to uniform the wall temperature, even with increasing flow temperature, is presented. The design consists of a series of microchannel sections with stepwise varying width. This scheme counteracts the flow temperature increase by reducing the local thermal resistance along the flow path. A test apparatus with uniform heat flux and distributed wall temperature measurements was developed for microchannel heat exchanger characterisation. The energy balance is checked and the temperature distribution is analysed for each test. The results show that the wall temperature decreases slightly along the flow path while the fluid temperature increases, highlighting the strong impact of this approach. For a flow rate of 16 ml/s, the mean thermal resistance of the heat sink is 2,35·10-5 m2·K/W which enhances the results compared to the millimeter scale channels nearly three-fold. For the same flow rate and a heat flux of 50 W/cm2, the temperature uniformity, expressed as the standard deviation of the wall temperature, is around 6 ºC.