Numerical investigation of heat transfer and pressure loss of double-layer microchannels for chip liquid cooling

The problem involved in the increase of the chip output power of high-performance integrated electronic devices is the failure of reliability because of excessive thermal loads. This requires advanced cooling methods to manage the increase of the dissipated heat. The traditional air-cooling may not meet the requirements, and therefore a new generation of liquid cooling technology becomes necessary. Various microchannels are widely used to cool the electronic chips by a gas or liquid, but these microchannels are often designed to be single-layer channels. In this paper, the laminar heat transfer and pressure loss in a kind of double-layer microchannel have been investigated numerically. The layouts of parallel-flow and counter-flow for inlet/outlet flow directions are designed and then several sets of inlet flowrates are considered. The simulations show that such a double-layer microchannel can not only reduce the pressure drop effectively but also exhibits better thermal characteristics, and the parallel-flow layout is found to be better for heat dissipation when the pumping power is limited, while the counter-flow layout is better when a high pumping power is provided.