Analytical Study of the Thermal Performance for an Embedded Microfluidic Cooling System

Abstract A compact, actively cooled heat dissipation solution has been designed and developed to adequately address the issue of increased heat generated within compact electronic devices and systems. High power density applications such as modular power converters can benefit from implementing this newly designed microfluidic cooling system, which consists of a 3-D manifold architecture and a finned microchannel array. Embedded cooling allows the manifold-microchannel (MMC) to be directly integrated into silicon carbide (SiC) based electronics, providing a more efficient thermal management system with significant mass and volume savings compared to conventional cooling strategies. This study investigates the feasibility of utilizing an MMC sample fabricated in SiC to meet chip-level heat dissipation targets of 100 W/cm2. The thermalfluidic performance was analyzed for different MMC configurations to obtain various measurements such as pressure and temperature for single-phase working fluids (i.e., water, low-GWP refrigerants, etc.). Analytical results produced from a reduced-order model show that the flow rate and the microchannel height greatly impact the performance of the MMC. Increasing the microchannel height from 200 to 300 μm provides thermal resistance of less than 0.3 K/W and pressure drop of less than 2 kPa across the system for certain working fluids.