An experimental investigation of forced convective cooling performance of a microchannel heat sink with Al2O3/water nanofluid

Experiments were conducted to investigate forced convective cooling performance of a copper micro-channel heat sink with Al2O3/water nanofluid as the coolant. The microchannel heat sink fabricated consists of 25 parallel rectangular microchannels of length 50 mu m with a cross-sectional area of 283 mu m in width by 800 mu m in height for each microchannel. Hydraulic and thermal performances of the nanofluid-cooled microchannel heat sink have been assessed from the results obtained for the friction factor, the pumping power, the averaged heat transfer coefficient, the thermal resistance, and the maximum wall temperature, with the Reynolds number ranging from 226 to 1676. Results show that the nanofluid-cooled heat sink outperforms the water-cooled one, having significantly higher average heat transfer coefficient and thereby markedly lower thermal resistance and wall temperature at high pumping power, in particular. Despite the marked increase in dynamic viscosity due to dispersing the alumina nanoparticles in water. the friction factor for the nanofluid-cooled heat sink was found slightly increased only. (C) 2009 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.