Pumping power and heating area dependence of thermal resistance for a large-scale microchannel heat sink under extremely high heat flux

In this paper, based on the Li-Peterson pumping consumption-thermal resistance optimization model, a single-phase structure-optimized large-scale microchannel heat sink with each channel having 0.2 mm width and 0.8 mm height for extremely high heat flux cooling was proposed and investigated. Employing deionized water as coolant, two different heat source areas were designed and the results were compared under different pumping power from 0.1 W to 6.5 W. The experimental and simulation results indicates that the proposed copper-based microchannel thermal management system can dissipate heat flux of 1000 W/cm2 over 1cm2 and 500 W/cm2 over 5cm2, respectively, adding critical data support to the database of single-phase microchannel heat sink with heat removal capacity exceeding 1000 W/cm2. Moreover, the possible minimum thermal resistance over a broad pumping power range of 0.1 W to 6.5 W was explored. Extremely low thermal resistance of 0.065 K/W and 0.019 K/W were obtained for these two heating area scenarios. Overall, the proposed copper-based optimized microchannel heat sink is an ideal solution to cool high heat flux devices.