Forced air cooling by using manifold microchannel heat sinks

A study of manifold microchannel (MMC) heat sinks for forced air cooling was performed experimentally. The manifold microchannel heat sink differs from a traditional microchannel (TMC) heat sink in that the flow length is greatly reduced to a small fraction of the total length of the heat sink. In other words, the MMC heat sink features many inlet and outlet channels, alternating at a periodic distance along the length of the microchannels while the TMC heat sink features one inlet and one outlet channels. The present study primarily focused to investigate the effects of geometrical parameters on the thermal performance of the manifold microchannel heat sinks for optimal design. Also, the thermal resistances of the MMC heat sinks were compared with those of the TMC heat sinks. Experimental results showed the thermal resistances of MMC heat sinks were affected strongly by the pumping power, the microchannel width and the manifold inlet/outlet channel width, but weakly by the microchannel thickness-width ratio and the microchannel depth coorporated with the manifold inlet/outlet channel width. However, it was found that there existed the optimum values of the latter parameters. Under the optimum condition of geometrical parameters in the present study, the thermal resistance of the MMC heat sink was approximately 35% lower than that of a TMC heat sink, which clearly demonstrated the effectiveness of using a manifold.