A microchannel heat exchanger design for microelectronics cooling correlating the heat transfer rate in terms of Brinkman number

Microchannel heat exchangers are a well known device in the application of microelectronics cooling. In this paper, liquid microchannel heat exchangers were designed and investigated with varying channel width in order to find the maximum cooling efficiency when combined with pumping performance. A recently developed correlation of heat transfer rate in terms of Nusselt number and Brinkman number was adopted to predict cooling efficiency of the microchannel heat exchanger and was compared with the experimental results. Conventional heat transfer theories and numerical commercial code were also used to predict the cooling efficiency. The measured minimum thermal resistance of the microchannel heat exchanger showed a good agreement with the prediction from the new correlation, whereas calculation results from conventional theories and numerical code showed large divergence. It can be seen that the microchannel heat exchanger can be optimized when combined with pumping performance. In addition, the new correlation of heat transfer rate in terms of Brinkman number can be quite a useful tool in design of microchannel heat exchanger.