Exploiting Flow Maldistribution to Improve the Thermal Performance of Cross-Flow Microchannel Heat Sinks

In previous work, these authors demonstrated that hot spot mitigation could be achieved byexploiting the flow maldistribution produced by properly designed headers. In the present study, the previous research effort is continued by numerically analyzing the degree of flow maldistribution required to achieve optimal thermal control of the heated surface of a cross-flow double-layered microchannel heat sink (XF-DL-MCHS). The numerical simulations were conducted using in-house finite element procedures to solve the parabolized form of theNavier-Stokes equations in the microchannels and the elliptical form of the thermal energyequation in the entire computational domain, corresponding to the core of the XF-DL-MCHS.The computed results showed that it is possible to find optimal degrees of flow maldistribution, which allow for significantly more uniform temperature fields over the heated surface than in the case of equal velocity in all microchannels.