Numerical Investigation of Fluid Flow and Heat Transfer Characteristics in Parallel Flow Single Layer Microchannels

Heat generation from Very Large-Scale Integrated (VLSI) circuits increases with the development of high-density integrated circuit technology. One of the ecient techniques is liquid cooling by using a microchannel heat sink. Numerical simulations on the microchannel heat sink in the literature are mainly two dimensional. The purpose of the present study is to develop a three-dimensional procedure to investigate ow and conjugate heat transfer in the microchannel heat sink for electronic packaging applications. A nite volume numerical code with a multigrid technique, based on an additive correction multigrid (AC-MG) scheme, which is a high-performance solver, is developed to solve the steady incompressible laminar Navier-Stokes (N-S) equations over a colocated Cartesian grid arrangement. The results show that the thermophysical properties of the liquid can essentially in uence both the ow and heat transfer in the microchannel heat sink. Comparison of the numerical results with other published numerical results and experimental data, available in the literature for Reynolds numbers less than 200, indicates that the assumption of hydrodynamically fully developed laminar ow is valid. The accuracy of the prediction has been veri ed by comparing the results obtained here with the numerical and analytical results from the open literature which showed a good agreement. The detailed temperature and heat ux distributions, as well as the average and bulk heat transfer characteristics, are reported and discussed. The analysis provides a unique fundamental insight into the complex heat ow pattern established in the channel due to combined convection-conduction e ects in the three-dimensional setting.