Flow Boiling Performance Evaluation of Recharging Microchannel

Abstract

Nowadays, miniaturization of high-performance electronic devices leads to higher heat generation, which needs efficient cooling to maintain device temperature below its operating temperature. This work proposed an efficient cooling technique using two-phase flow boiling in a recharging microchannel (RMC) and compared its performance with the conventional simple microchannel (SMC). A three-dimensional numerical investigation is carried out using the volume-of-fluid multiphase model and evaporation–condensation phase-change model in ANSYS Fluent V15. Water with mass fluxes of 100 and 500 kg/(m²·s) enters through the microchannel at inlet subcooling of 5 °C, whereas the substrate bottom surface is subjected to constant heat flux in the range of 10–40 W/cm². The water saturation temperature is considered as 50 °C, corresponding to the saturation pressure of 12.352 kPa. Results reveal that the RMC shows enhanced heat transfer coefficient, reduced thermal resistance, reduced wall superheat, and reduced substrate temperature compared to SMC. Besides, the RMC shows a reduced pressure drop than the SMC at lower mass flux, whereas it shows an increased pressure drop at higher mass flux. The flow boiling instabilities can mitigate during the bubbly flow regime in RMC. This study suggests the possible application of flow boiling in RMC to cool high-performance electronic devices.

Acknowledgments

The authors acknowledge the Data Center, National Institute of Technology Rourkela, Odisha, India, for providing the High-Performance Computing facility to carry out this research. The authors also acknowledge the support from Dr. Gaurav Hedau and Dr. Prasenjit Dey, Mechanical Engineering Department, Indian Institute of Technology Bombay, Maharashtra, India, in validating the present numerical model.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Sangram Kumar Samal

Sangram Kumar Samal is a Post-Doctoral Fellow at the Department of Mechanical Engineering, Indian Institute of Technology Bombay, India. He received his Ph.D. degree from National Institute of Technology Rourkela, India in 2021. He is actively doing research on fluid flow and heat transfer in microchannel heat sink, two-phase flow boiling, entropy generation, nanofluids, multiphase flow, electronic cooling, and condensation.

Sandip K. Saha

Sandip Kumar Saha is a Professor at the Department of Mechanical Engineering, Indian Institute of Technology Bombay, India. He received his B.E. degree in Mechanical Engineering from Jadavpur University, Kolkata, India, and his M.Sc. (Engg.) and Ph.D. degrees from the Indian Institute of Science, Bangalore, India, respectively. Prior to joining the Indian Institute of Technology Bombay, he was with R&D TATA Steel, India, as a Researcher and Applied Mechanics and Energy Conversion, Department of Mechanical Engineering, KU Leuven, Leuven, Belgium, as a Post-Doctoral Fellow. He has received the BASE fellowship and Fulbright-Nehru Academic and Professional Excellence Fellowships to conduct research on Solar Thermal Applications. He has been awarded the IIT Bombay research award 2020. His research interests include computational fluid dynamics, heat transfer, thermal management of electronics, microchannel cooling, thermal storage systems for solar thermal applications and thermal management of buildings. He has authored or coauthored over 110 journal articles and filed for six patents.

Manoj Kumar Moharana

Manoj Kumar Moharana is an Assistant Professor at the Department of Mechanical Engineering, National Institute of Technology Rourkela, India. He received his Ph.D. degree from Indian Institute of Technology Kanpur, India in 2012. His research interests include microscale fluid flow and heat transfer, flow boiling heat transfer, multiphase flow, heat pipe, computational fluid dynamics, and cryogenic heat transfer.