Experimental flow visalization and analytic thermal modeling of multi-channel wall for electronics

The multi-channel wall has been proposed and demonstrated in our previous work as an effective enhancement of passive way of electronics cooling. The flow characteristics of the simplest structure observed with PIV measurement was already reported in the paper. Since the three-dimensional channel flow contains complexity, such as folk and junction or edge effect, it was essential to investigate the phenomenon with the simplest structure. And it was successfully modeled numerically. In this report, more realistic multi-channel wall is investigated in the experiments, discussed with the analytic model and studied with the numerical calculations. A new apparatus has been developed for this particular characterization. A channeled wall with six channels is prepared for the experiment. This sample is developed to simulate a part of the typical electronics enclosure. A novel PIV setup for visualization is built based on the same technique which was used previously, but is designed to set the precise slice of the airflow profiles in depth of the channels. The three-dimensional velocity profiles in the channel were successfully observed with temperature profile at the same time in this apparatus. Based on the comparison between numerical results and experimental results, characteristic of the multi-channel wall is found slightly different from the Elenbaas´ isothermal wall correlation, essentially because of the inter-wall thermal radiation