An Ultra High Performance Heat Sink Using a Novel Hybrid Impinging Microjet - Microchannel Structure

This work describes the development of a single phase water-cooled microfluidic heat exchanger for cooling very high heat flux electronics. The heat sink was designed for a unique additive manufacturing process capable of manufacturing millimeter-scale metallic parts with micron-scale features. The design was undertaken using Simulation-Driven Design whereby the commercial Computational Fluid Dynamics software ANSYS Fluent was utilized. The final embodiment of the design is a water-cooled microchannel heat sink using an array of fins with integrated microjets (FINJET™ architecture). The thermal performance is quite extraordinary, with a measured effective thermal conductance of 296 kW/m2K for a flow rate of 0.5 L/min. With such an exceptionally high thermal conductance, the heat sink is predicted to maintain an average base temperature of under 58°C with a maximum variation about the mean of $\pm$ 3°C for an imposed heat flux of 1000 W/cm2.