Additive Manufacturing of Liquid-cooled Ceramic Heat Sinks: An Experimental and Numerical Study

With recent advances in power electronic packaging technologies, liquid-cooled ceramic heat sinks have been considered as a promising solution for further improving the performance of power electronic devices. In this study, several aluminum oxide heat sinks were fabricated and tested using the digital light processing-based additive manufacturing method, to verify their practical performance. The results showed that the complex cooling structures inside the heat sinks can be completely formed and exhibited high surface quality. The experimental thermal and hydraulic performances of the heat sinks were consistent with the numerically modeled predictions. Furthermore, by exploiting the advantages of additive manufacturing, a direct manifold microchannel (MMC) configuration was designed to reduce the vertical flow of the traditional MMC configuration and achieve an improved cooling efficiency. At a constant volumetric flow rate of 1 L/min, the direct MMC configuration achieved a 19.8% reduction in pressure drop and an 11.8% reduction in thermal resistance, as well as a more uniform temperature distribution.