A Thermal–Hydraulic Comparison of Liquid Microchannel and Impinging Liquid Jet Array Heat Sinks for High-Power Electronics Cooling

In this paper, two single-phase liquid cooling strategies for electronics thermal management are compared and contrasted; impinging jet arrays and laminar flow in microchannels. The comparison is posed for a situation in which an electronic device must dissipate 250 W/cm2 while being maintained at a temperature of 85 °C. The calculations indicate that both the impinging jet and microchannel heat sinks can provide the necessary cooling with less than 0.1 W of pumping power. Microchannels achieve this heat transfer target with such low pumping power by the relatively high pressure drop being offset by a low volumetric flow rate. In contrast, impinging jet heat sinks require a lower pressure drop and higher volumetric flow rate. From a practical point of view, lower operating pressure and larger mass flow rates are desirable characteristics, since they will be less prone to leakage and will provide better temperature uniformity across the heated component.