Research progress on structural optimization design of microchannel heat sinks applied to electronic devices

As the miniaturization of electronic devices continues and the heat flux increases rapidly, thermal management techniques are facing serious challenges. Microchannel heat sinks are considered to be one of the most promising thermal management devices for cooling high heat flux miniaturized electronic devices, but conventional parallel straight microchannels have problems such as low heat flow density and non-uniform flow distribution. Therefore, microchannel structure design has been heavily investigated. This paper provides a comprehensive review of the latest research progress in the design of microchannel flow channel layouts, enhanced structures within the flow channel, and combinations of microchannel structures. Microchannel flow channel designs are summarized in detail, including sawtooth, serpentine, bionic fractal, wavy, double-layer, and manifold. The effects of enhanced structures in microchannels, such as ribs, fins, cavities, and porous, on heat transfer performance and pump power loss are reviewed. In addition, the microchannel structure combinations are classified, i.e., flow channel and cavity, flow channel and porous, flow channel and fin, porous and fin, and cavity and fin. The effects of different combination methods on the heat dissipation performance, temperature uniformity, and pressure drop of the microchannels are also analyzed. Finally, this paper analyzes and summarizes the different structural designs of microchannels, and reasonably clarifies the future research directions of microchannel structural design.