Effects of structural parameters on flow boiling performance of reentrant porous microchannels

Flow boiling within advanced microchannel heat sinks provides an efficient and attractive method for the cooling of microelectronics chips. In this study, a series of porous microchannels with Ω-shaped reentrant configurations were developed for application in heat sink cooling. The reentrant porous microchannels were fabricated by using a solid-state sintering method under the replication of specially designed sintering modules. Micro wire electrical discharge machining was utilized to process the graphite-based sintering modules. Two types of commonly used copper powder in heat transfer devices, i.e., spherical and irregular powder, with three fractions of particle sizes respectively, were utilized to construct the porous microchannel heat sinks. The effects of powder type and size on the flow boiling performance of reentrant porous microchannels, i.e., two-phase heat transfer, pressure drop and flow instabilities, were examined under boiling deionized water conditions. The test results show that enhanced two-phase heat transfer was achieved with the increase of particle size for the reentrant porous microchannels with spherical powder, while the reversed trend existed for the counterparts with irregular powder. The reentrant porous microchannels with irregular powder of the smallest particle size presented the best heat transfer performance and lowest pressure drop.