Tradeoffs of Electronics Liquid Cooling Design Features
Open Access
- Author:
- Morse, Joshua
- Graduate Program:
- Mechanical Engineering
- Degree:
- Master of Science
- Document Type:
- Master Thesis
- Date of Defense:
- June 18, 2021
- Committee Members:
- Karen Thole, Program Head/Chair
Bladimir Ramos Alvarado, Thesis Advisor/Co-Advisor
Stephen P Lynch, Committee Member - Keywords:
- electronics
liquid
cooling
cooled
chips
pin
fin
channel
price
manufacturing
header
design
heat
transfer
convection
conduction
power - Abstract:
- As consumer electronics get more complex, the need for innovation in the field of thermal management increases. Products are getting smaller, smarter, faster, and more computationally demanding. These trends cause the products’ electronics to get hotter, as well. Hot temperatures trigger electronics overheating, which causes most instances of electronics failure. Thus, cooling the electronics is essential because products which require electronics to function range across all industries, such as automotive, medical, military, electronics, and tech industries. Some specific product examples include data server racks, electric car batteries, jet engines, and heart rate monitoring equipment. All of these electronics require cooling to avoid failure. Liquid cooling is one common method of cooling electronics. This thesis details liquid cooling heat sink design choices and their effects on heat transfer, fluid flow and fabrication cost. This work also explores the design of liquid cooling for a specific electronics industry application: cooling a circuit board designed and manufactured by the electronics company Keysight Technologies. The approach used was to examine the effect on performance and price of three common design features of liquid cooling heat sinks: the header angle, pin fin geometry, and mini channel geometry. Specifically, the effect of diameter and spacing of the pin fin geometry and the effect of length of the mini channel geometry were examined. The methods used were that of numerical CFD simulation using the Ansys Fluent 19.2 software package. The system’s geometry was modeled using 3D modeling software and set up for simulation in Ansys Fluent using the appropriate boundary conditions of the physical system. The simulations yielded raw pressure and temperature data, which were processed into a combined heat transfer and hydraulic performance parameter PPTC. Since this was a real-world application to be used for purchasing prototypes, manufacturing cost was considered as well. The manufacturing price was combined with the PPTC parameter to implement a PPTC/$ parameter, using which can allow comparison between each heat sink design. This examination of manufacturing price is unique because many studies focus solely on technical performance parameters and neglect the price of fabrication. It was found that the cases with the top three PPTC/$ values, in order from highest to lowest, are MCSF-AL (mini channel short fin-aluminum), MCSF (mini channel short fin-copper), and PF1-2 (Pin fin, 1mm diameter, 1mm spacing-copper).