Hybrid liquid metal-water cooling system for heat dissipation of high power density microdevices

The recent decades have witnessed a remarkable advancement of very large scale integrated circuits (VLSI) and electronic equipments in micro-electronic industry. Meanwhile, the ever increasing power density of microdevices leads to the tough issue that thermal management becomes rather hard to solve. Conventional water cooling is widely used, but the convective coefficient is not high enough. Liquid metal owns much higher convective coefficient and has been identified as an effective coolant recently, but the high cost greatly precludes its large scale utilization. In this paper, a hybrid liquid metal-water cooling system which combines the advantages of both water and liquid metal cooling was proposed and demonstrated. By utilizing a liquid metal "heat spreader" in front of the water cooling module, this system not only owns more excellent cooling capability than that based on water alone, but also has much lower initial cost compared with absolute liquid metal cooling system. A series of experiments under different operation conditions have been performed to evaluate the cooling performance of this hybrid system. The compared results with absolute water cooling and liquid metal cooling system showed that the cooling capability of the new system is competitive with absolute liquid metal cooling, but the initial cost could be much lower. The theoretical thermal resistance model and economic feasibility also have been analyzed and discussed, which shows that the hybrid liquid metal-water cooling system is quite feasible and useful.