Optimum thermal design of microchannel heat sinks by the simulated annealing method

By adopting the simulated annealing method, a three-dimensional numerical simulation is executed to minimize the thermal resistance of the microchannel heat sink corresponding to the optimum specification under the fixed flow power. The depths of the microchannel heat sink in this study are fixed at either 1 cm or 2 cm. Based on the theory of the fully developed flow, the pressure drop between the inlet and exit in each single channel can be analytically derived if the flow power and the associated specification of the microchannel heat sink are fixed in advance. Then, this pressure drop will be used as the input condition to calculate the temperature distribution of the microchannel heat sink. For the first part of the optimum analysis, the fin width, and channel width are chosen as the design variables to find their optimum sizes. As to the second part of the present analysis, three design variables including channel height, fin width and channel width are individually prescribed as a suitable range to search for their optimum geometric configuration when the other specifications of the microchannel heat sink are fixed as 24 different cases.