Convection and Flow Boiling In Microgaps and Porous Foam Coolers: Investigation of Flow Regime and Heat Transfer Performance in Microgaps and Porous Foam Coolers

Abstract

The flow regime progression in such a micro gap channelis shown to be predicted by the traditional flow regime maps. Moreover, annularflow is shown to be the dominant regime for this thermal transportconfiguration and to grow in importance as the channel diameter decreases. Anopen and foam-filled micro gap cooler, providing direct liquid cooling for asimulated electronic/photonic component and which eliminates the problematicthermal resistance of the commonly-used thermal interface material (TIM), isexamined. The single phase heat transfer and pressure drop results of water areused to validate a detailed numerical model and, together with the convectiveFC-72 data, establish a baseline for micro gap cooler performance.