Semi-analytical investigation of electronics cooling using developing nanofluid flow in rectangular microchannels

Thermal management issues are limiting barriers to high density electronics packaging and miniaturization. Liquid cooling using microchannels is an attractive alternative to bulky aluminum heat sinks. The channels can be integrated directly into a chip, and cooling can be further enhanced using nanofluids. The goals of this study are to evaluate heat transfer improvement of a rectangular channel nanofluid heat sink with developing laminar flow, taking into account the pumping power penalty. The proposed model uses semi-empirical correlations to calculate effective nanofluid thermophysical properties, which are then incorporated into heat transfer and friction factor correlations in literature for single-phase flows. The predictions of the model are found to be in good agreement with experimental studies. The validated model is used to predict the thermal resistance and pumping power as a function of four design variables that include the channel width, the wall width, the flow velocity and the particle volume fraction. The parameters are optimized using a Genetic Algorithm (GA) with minimum thermal resistance as the objective function, and fixed specified value of pumping power as the constraint. For a given value of pumping power, the benefit of nanoparticle addition is evaluated by independently optimizing the heat sink, first with nanofluid, and then with base fluid. Comparing the minimized thermal resistances revealed only a small benefit since the nanoparticles increase the pumping power which can alternately be diverted toward an increased velocity in a pure fluid heat sink. The benefit further diminishes with increase in available pumping power.