Improvement of flow and heat transfer performance of manifold microchannel with porous fins

Abstract

Thermal management is restricting the further development of electronic devices. The rapid development of communication and chip manufacturing technologies results in an unprecedented increase on heat dissipation of electronics, which also makes the thermal management system consume a substantial amount of energy. Therefore, the manifold microchannel (MMC) is particularly important as an efficient thermal management scheme to enhance heat transfer and reduce the energy consumption. For this objective, the flow and heat transfer characteristics of MMCs with porous fins are investigated by numerical method in this study. The results show that the introduction of porous fins can reduce the pressure drop by up to 19%. In addition, the porous fins arranged on the outlet manifold side can significantly optimize the non-uniform flow distribution among the microchannels and strengthen the heat transfer of MMC. Furthermore, for MMC with the porous fins on the outlet manifold side with a proportion of 75%, the thermal resistance can be reduced by 19.8% and the PEC will increase by 46.2%, which performs the best among all the investigated cases.