Numerical Analysis of a Miniature-Scale Refrigeration System (MSRS) for Electronics Cooling

This paper presents the numerical analysis of a Miniature-Scale Refrigeration System (MSRS) for electronics cooling. The system consists of a simulated electronic chip attached to a microchannel cold plate evaporator, a compressor, a microchannel condenser, and an expansion device. The system uses R-134a as the refrigerant. A copper block heater is designed to simulate the heat generation of an electronic chip by using two cartridge heaters of 200 W each. The heat from the simulated CPU is transferred to the cold plate evaporator via a copper heat spreader. The heat spreader is employed to provide uniform heat dissipation from the copper block to the evaporator. In order to analyze the system performance and determine the operating conditions, a numerical simulation of the MSRS was conducted. In addition, the “Fluent”-software was employed to analyze the heat spreader. Experimental results that were obtained using a bread board MSRS were used to validate the model results.