Study of thermal and hydraulic performance of air cooled minichannel heatsink with novel geometries

Numerical and experimental study of minichannel heat sinks (MCHS), with air as a cooling medium, has been performed for straight channel heatsink (SC HS), wavy channel heatsink (WC HS) and branch wavy channel heatsink (BWC HS) to investigate thermal and hydraulic performances. After considering both the conduction and the convection as a mode of heat transfer, numerical computation of three-dimensional conjugated heat transfer between the heat sink and air flow has been performed by using full domain simulation in ANSYS Fluent. Laminar model is selected for the study of air flow and heat transfer as the Reynolds number varied from 300 to 1900 for a different range of air flow rates. Heating powers of 20 watt and 30 watt are applied at the base of the heat sink. Followed by detailed experimentation, the numerical results are also examined to get acquainted with the flow fields and their roles in the thermal performance of individual heat sinks. It has been found that the thermal-hydraulic performance factor of BWC HS exhibited superiority over SC HS and WC HS. It is also noticed that significant improvements in the junction temperature of BWC HS have been achieved. Experimental results have been validated with numerical results.