Investigation of Cooling Performance of a Swirl Microchannel Heat Sink by Numerical Simulation
High heat fluxes have been created by the semiconductor devices due to the high power generation and shrank size. The large heat flux causes the circuit to exceed its allowable temperature and may experience both working efficiency loss and irreversible damage due to excess in their temperatures. In this paper, a swirl microchannel heat sink is designed to dissipate the large heat flux from the devices. The numerical simulation is carried out to investigate the cooling performance. Uniform heating boundary condition is applied and single phase water is selected as coolant. The present micro heat sink applies multiple swirl microchannels positioned in a circular flat plate to enhance the heat convection by creating the secondary flow at high Reynolds numbers. Copper is selected as the material of heat sink. The channel depth and width are fixed as 0.5 mm and 0.4 mm, respectively. The heat is injected into the system from the bottom of heat sink at the heat fluxes from 10 to 60 W/cm2. Flow is supplied from the top of micro heat sink through a jet hole with a diameter of 2 mm and enters swirl microchannels at the volume flow rates varying from 47 to 188 ml/min. The cooling performances of swirl microchannel heat sinks with different curvatures and channel numbers are evaluated based on the targets of low maximum temperature, temperature gradient and pressure drop.