Effect of Localized Hotspot on the Thermal Performance of Two-Phase Microchannel Heat Exchanger

Microchannel heat exchangers using two-phase convective boiling is one of the most promising future technologies for the cooling of microprocessors. Heat generation on microprocessors is highly non-uniform due to the presence of multiple time-varying localized hotspots. Previous literature has primarily been focused on the performance of microchannels under uniform heating conditions. In this paper we report the performance of microchannel heat exchanger under both uniform and hotspot (non-uniform) heating conditions. We performed these experiments using a novel test setup where the test chip has multiple temperature sensors, one heater to provide uniform heating and a hotspot heater of size 400 μm × 400 μm. We report some of the preliminary results on the thermal performance of the heat exchanger. Results show that fluctuation in the wall temperature is different under hotspot heating conditions as compared to the uniform heating conditions.   This paper was also originally published as part of the Proceedings of the ASME 2005 Heat Transfer Summer Conference.