Evaluation of Heat Transfer Performance of a Spiral Microfluidic Heatsink and Heat Exchanger Device

Abstract

Developments in micro-technology have seen vast improvements in the design and the thermal performance of heat sinks and heat exchangers, particularly in the case of spiral microfluidic devices which deals with the flow of liquids inside curved micrometer-sized channels. The current research deals with a specially designed curved microfluidic channel used to employ the fluid mixing characteristics of Dean vortices and thus transfer heat more efficiently. This curved microfluidic channel is deployed as a spiral channel to create an effective heat sink and a heat exchanger. The novel micro heat exchanger is built by integrating two or more of the specially designed microfluidic heat sink layers. For the ease of fabricating the microchannels, these devices are polymer-based. In this paper, the thermal performance of the spiral microfluidic devices is analyzed numerically and experimentally using a range of flow rates where Thermal Performance Factor is used to find a balanced point between heat transfer and pressure drop. The spiral heat exchange device proves to be an effective thermal transport system with the introduction of curved channels in the devices where the presence of Dean vortices in the system is observed, especially at lower flow rates. It can be observed that by increasing the number of layers, the thermal performance is greatly improved. This is due to the higher surface area with increasing number of layers, as well as a parallel flow structure through the layers. These results serve as a design parameter for developing microchannel-based heat transfer devices that can achieve high efficiency of heat and mass transfer. Further heat sink and heat exchanger design improvements are discussed.