Experimental and numerical studies of fluid flow confined in microchannel

The heat transfer performance of fluid flowing in a microchannel was experimentally studied, to meet the requirement of extremely high heat flux removal of microelectronic devices. There were 10 parallel microchannels with rectangular cross-section in the stainless steel plate, which was covered by a glass plate to observe the fluid flowing behavior, and another heating plate made of aluminum alloy was positioned behind the microchannel. Single phase heat transfer and fluid flow downstream the microchannel experiments were conducted with both deionized water and ethanol. Besides experiments, numerical models were also set up to make a comparison with experimental results. It is found that the pressure drop increases rapidly with enlarging Reynolds number (200), especially for ethanol. With comparison, the flow resistance of pure water is smaller than ethanol. Results also show that the friction factor decreases with Reynolds number smaller than the critical value, while increases the velocity, the friction factor would like to keep little changed. We also find that the water friction factors obtained by CFD simulations in parallel microchannels are much larger than experiment results. With heat flux added to the fluid, the heat transfer performance can be enhanced with larger Re number and the temperature rise could be weaken. Compared against ethanol, water performed much better for heat removal. However, with intensive heat flux, both water and ethanol couldn't meet the requirement and the temperature at outlet would increase remarkably, extremely for ethanol. These findings would be helpful for thermal management design and optimization.