The study on design of flow path and effect of heat removal for liquid-cooled thermal module

Abstract

Paper presented at the 9th International Conference on Heat Transfer, Fluid Mechanics and Thermodynamics, Malta, 16-18 July, 2012.

Semiconductor components have their power enhanced and their effectiveness improved gradually, leading to an increasing demand of heat removal in them. Therefore, an increase in heat removal volume of heat sink is currently an important issue. It is known that water cooling system can solve the problem effectively. The paper, mainly focusing on the liquid-cooled thermal module used for heat generation of microchip in water cooling system, alters the geometric change in its flow path, and explores its influence on heat removal effectiveness of thermal module. Through a software for calculation of fluid mechanics, and verification by practical experiments, the paper analyzes three kinds of thermal modules so as to explore the change and influence of heat removal performance. Using the software FLUENT for calculation of fluid mechanics, the paper calculates the heat sink of three different modules, explores the thermal conduction problem under different CPU wattages, and observes the internal flow path change and temperature field distribution. After that, through calculation of fluid mechanics, the paper predicts the flow path change and temperature field distribution under different flow velocities. When simulation analysis is made, it can be found that heat resistance value of thermal module does not have obvious change with the rise of wattage, but contrarily decreases with the increase of flow velocity. Finally, the paper induces that snake-shaped cylindrical composite flow path can achieve the best heat removal effect; snake-shaped flow path is the second best one; and cylindrical flow path is the worst. The heat resistance values of these three flow paths are 0.08℃/W, 0.1℃/W and 0.15℃/W respectively.