Modeling heat transfer and liquid flow in micro-channels

The use of micro-channels in order to cool modern high speed electronic circuits is one of the techniques frequently adopted in current practice. A burst of publications in this area has been observed in the last decade. However, modeling of fluid flow and heat transfer in micro-channels is still an open problem. In fact, many deviations have been experimentally observed between well established correlations used for conventional normally sized channels and the behavior of microchannels. These deviations increase as the channel size decreases. In this work, observed experimental deviations are first listed, followed by a critical review of different hypotheses advanced in the literature to explain them. One of these hypotheses is thoroughly developed in order to build a model that explains both the orders of magnitudes and the trends of observed phenomena.