COMPUTATIONAL FLUID DYNAMICS ANALYSIS OF RECTANGULAR MICROCHANNEL HEAT SINK

Abstract

In the study, the analysis of fluid flow and heat transfer in a rectangular microchannel heat sink has been carried out with the help of computational fluid dynamics (CFD) .The experimental work done performed by Lee and Mudawar (2002) was simulated for this study. The CFD model equations are solved to analyze the hydrodynamic and thermal behaviour of the rectangular microchannel heat sink. The geometry of the problem is created in Solidworks while meshing has been done in ANSYS Workbench. The model has been solved by ANSYS Fluent 15 solver. The three-dimensional heat transfer characteristics of the heat sink were analyzed numerically by solving the conjugate heat transfer problem involving simultaneous determination of the temperature distribution in both the solid and liquid regions. The measured pressure drop and temperature distributions show good agreement with the corresponding numerical results. These findings demonstrate that the conventional Navier–Stokes and energy equations can adequately predict the fluid flow and heat transfer characteristics of micro-channel size used in present study.