Capacity Evaluation of a MEMS Based Micro Cooling Device Using Liquid Metal as Coolant

The latest generation of gigahertz-clock-rate CPUs is becoming more challenging to fit into designs. These chips are squeezing into tighter and tighter spaces with no enough places for heat to dissipate. Meanwhile, high-capacity cooling options remain limited for many small-scale applications such as microsystems, sensors and actuators, and micro/nano electronic components. This work presents a MEMS based micro cooling device, which is comprised of an active cooling substrate embedded with fluidic cooling functionality using liquid metal, to provide direct cooling to high heat flux electronics and MEMS devices. In order to better understand the cooling capability of this MEMS-based micro cooling device, the three-dimensional heat transfer process thus involved was numerically simulated. A series of calculations with different flow rates and thermal parameters were performed. Effect of different working fluids is also investigated. The results indicate that the MEMS-based cooling device has powerful cooling capability while using liquid metal as cooling fluid, and thus allow for lower operating temperatures for electronic devices and micro/nano systems