Simulation of Fractal Like Branching Microchannel Network on Rectangular Heat Sink for Single Phase Flow
Keywords:
CFD, heat sink, fractal microchannelAbstract
development of the very large-skill technology. However, with the increase of circuit
density and operating speed, more heat was generated by the microelectronics
devices. So, the objective of this project is to do a comparative study between two
different types of fractal microchannel at the same size and boundary condition by
using Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD) Besides that, this study also will
investigate the hydrodynamic and thermal characteristics of T-shaped and Tree
shaped fractal microchannel network heat sinks by solving three-dimensional Navier–
Stokes equations and energy equation, taking into consideration the conjugate heat
transfers in microchannel walls. For the simulation, ANSYS software was used with
the inlet temperature set to be 300 K, inlet velocity will be in the range of 0.1 m/s to
0.5 m/s and uniform heat flux be set at 325 W/cm2 . From this study, it was found that
due to the structural limitation of right-angled fractal-shaped microchannel network,
hotspots may appear on the bottom wall of the heat sink where the microchannel are
sparsely distributed. With slight modifications in both fractal-shaped structure of
microchannel network, great improvements on the hydrodynamic and thermal
performance of heat sink can be achieved. A comparison of the performance of
modified fractal-shaped microchannel network heat sink with parallel microchannel
heat sink is also conducted numerically based on the same heat sink dimensions. It is
found that the modified fractal-shaped microchannel network is much better in
terms of thermal resistance and temperature uniformity under the conditions of the
same pressure drop or pumping power. Therefore, the modified fractal-shaped
microchannel network heat sink appears promising to be used for microelectronic
cooling in the future.