Abstract:
Design of effective microcooling systems to address the challenges of ever increasing
heat flux from microdevices requires deep examination of real-time problems and has
been tackled in depth. The most common (and apparently misleading) assumption while
designing microcooling systems is that the heat flux generated by the device is uniform,
but the reality is far from this. Detailed simulations have been performed by considering
nonuniform heat load employing the configurations U, I, and Z for parallel microchannel
systems with water and nanofluids as the coolants. An IntelVR
CoreTM i7-4770 3.40 GHz
quad core processor has been mimicked using heat load data retrieved from a real microprocessor with nonuniform core activity. This study clearly demonstrates that there is a
nonuniform thermal load induced temperature maldistribution along with the already
existent flow maldistribution induced temperature maldistribution. The suitable configuration(s) for maximum possible overall heat removal for a hot zone while maximizing the
uniformity of cooling have been tabulated. An Eulerian–Lagrangian model of the nanofluids shows that such “smart” coolants not only reduce the hot spot core temperature
but also the hot spot core region and thermal slip mechanisms of Brownian diffusion and
thermophoresis are at the crux of this. The present work conclusively shows that high
flow maldistribution leads to high thermal maldistribution, as the common prevalent
notion is no longer valid and existing maldistribution can be effectively utilized to tackle
specific hot spot location, making the present study important to the field.
