Paper presented at the 8th International Conference on Heat Transfer, Fluid Mechanics and Thermodynamics, Mauritius, 11-13 July, 2011.
Recent progress in the study of two-phase flow boiling in
single microchannels and multi-microchannels and the
challenges posed by microelectronics cooling are reviewed.
Experimental investigations have shown that uniform and
transient heat fluxes and local hot-spots can be well handled by
micro-evaporators. Furthermore, advances in the prediction of
two-phase pressure drops and flow pattern transitions in
microchannels are presented. The development of mechanistic
models specific to the important flow regimes (elongated
bubble flow and annular flow) opens the possibility for
integrated flow pattern-based prediction methods. Presently two
such methods are combined together to capture the transition
between these two regimes and thus better predict the trends in
the local flow boiling heat transfer process.
