Parametric study on the thermal performance of double-layered microchannel heat sinks

In this paper, a three-dimensional solid-fluid conjugate model was employed to study thermal performance in a nanofluid-cooled, silicon-based double-layered microchannel heat sink (DL-MCHS). The governing differential equations are solved using finite volume method in OpenFOAM, which is an open-source package for computational fluid dynamics. An extension of the available solver, chtMultiRegionSimpleFoam with the assumption of constant thermophysical properties was employed. The numerical solver was validated against experimental data extracted from the previous experimental studies. Three design variables: aspect ratio, channel width and fin width were investigated at a fixed pumping power to search for a minimum of thermal resistance. Results of this study show that at a constant pumping power, double-layered microchannel heat sinks with high aspect ratio, high channel width and low fin width have better thermal performance.