Thermal analysis of the influence of chip arrangement of a water-cooled minichannel heat sink

Abstract

Electronic chips are arranged in various manners according to design conditions and constraints, and thus the influence of chip arrangement on the entire thermal performance should be understood ahead of design and manufacture of electronic cooling systems. In this paper, a minichannel heat sink is considered for electronic cooling, and three kinds of chip arrangement are designed and studied: diagonal arrangement (Case 1), parallel arrangement (Case 2), and stacked arrangement (Case 3). The single-phase laminar liquid flow and conjugated heat transfer of the minichannel heat sinks are investigated through computational fluid dynamics technique for dealing with the normal-scale Navier-Stokes equations and energy equations. Numerically predicted results are qualified by comparing the previous experimental data and by a grid-independent test. Temperature distributions on the chip surfaces are presented and the thermal performance in terms of total thermal resistance is also compared. It is found with diagonal arrangement (Case 1) the minichannel heat sink provides the best thermal performance.