Experimental study of heat transfer in a microchannel with pin fins and sintered coatings

Increasing processing capacity without modifying the size of electronic devices has made thermal management important in the electronic industry. Commercialized thermal management, such as in a conventional air cooling system, is insufficient for electronic devices with high heat flux dissipation. Pool boiling is a better method for heat transfer because it can dissipate a substantial amount of heat at low wall superheats. This study focused on heat transfer enhancement using passive approaches, including nanostructures and microporous sintered surfaces over open microchannel surfaces and microchannels with pin-fins. In the present work, seven structures were studied in pool boiling, wherein experiments elucidated the effects of microchannels, sintered, and pin fins (micropillar) on boiling heat transfer from a copper chip in a pool of degassed water. Boiling performance is ascertained via critical heat flux (CHF) and heat transfer coefficient (HTC). The best heat transfer performance showed a heat flux of 243.75W/cm2 at 15.46°C on the pin-fins chip, which was 1.9 times the heat flux of the plain chip. The highest HTC was 181.03 kW/(m2 oC) at a heat flux of 172.61 W/cm2 for the microchannel with single pin-fins. The HTC enhancement was 2.8 times greater than the plain surface. It was found experimentally that HTC and CHF improved on all modified surfaces compared to the plain copper chip baseline. © 2023 Taylor & Francis.