Simulation of the Macroscopic Heat Transfer and Flow Behaviours in Microchannel Heat Sinks using Porous Media Approximation

Due to the high performance of electronic components, the heat generated is increasing dramatically and cooling system for such components becomes one of the most important issues to dissipate heat that generated in electronic component. In the present analysis, a microchannel heat sink configuration is simulated by modelling the stacked microchannel heat sinks in macroscopic scale as if it is a fluid saturated porous medium. The solutions are obtained numerical using a Brinkmann-based formulation. In order to accurately predict the ‘permeability’ of the stacked microchannels, the simulations are compared with simulated single microchannel heat sink assuming incompressible flow and good agreement was found with the simulation as well as experimental results performed by other researchers. Then the verified porous-media-like-microchannels are combined to be part of a computational domain of a CFD simulation where solutions to the simulation can be used to design and optimize the gating system for the heat sink. Key-Words: Microchannel heat sink; Porous media approximation; Heat transfer; Thermal management; Watercooled