Investigations on a Variable-Channel-Width Double-Layered Minichannel Heat Sink

Incessant development of electronic components necessitates the exploration of efficient cooling devices to meet the demand of high heat dissipation with less pressure drop penalty. In view of that, a novel liquid-cooled variable-channel-width double-layered minichannel heat sink (VW DL-MCHS) is proposed in this paper. A detailed numerical investigation on VW DL-MCHS is carried out using 3-D solid-fluid conjugated heat transfer model for the counter and parallel flow configurations. The influence of the dimensionless stepped fin length (λ) on the thermal performance of a VW DL-MCHS is investigated by considering the same values of λ (0.25, 0.50, 0.75, 0.8, 0.85, 0.9, 0.95) in both layers. After obtaining the optimal value of λ, the investigations are carried forward to study the influence of different values of λ in each layer of VW DL-MCHS by considering 0%, 25%, and 50% overlapping of the dense fin region of the upper layer over the dense fin region of the lower layer. The results show that a counter-flow VW DL-MCHS with zero overlap (0%) turns out to be the best geometry with the overall improvement in thermal performance of 8.68 times than the conventional single-layered-MCHS and 3.7318 times higher than the conventional DL-MCHS.