Numerical simulation on the heat sink with interrupted microchannels regarding of heat transfer enhancement

Microchannel heat sinks are widely used in the era of electronic equipment heat dissipation. This paper builds a numerical model of the heat sink with the interrupted rectangular microchannel and uses the experimental platform for validation. Two interrupted models including in-lined and staggered types are simulated to enhance the performance of the heat sink. The results show that the staggered type microchannels exhibit the lowest thermal resistance but the highest frictional resistance coefficient while the continuous microchannels have the opposite performance. However, the effect of heat transfer enhancement is decreasing with the increment of the interruption spacing for both of the in-lined and staggered interrupted microchannels as the overall heat transfer area is decreasing. Using the performance evaluation criterion (PEC) to evaluate the global heat transfer and flow characteristics of the heat sinks shows that the PEC of the in-lined interrupted microchannel is approximately 1.10 times higher, while the PEC of the staggered type is about 1.23 times higher compared to the continuous microchannel. This improvement is due to the interruption of the boundary layer by the cavity and the flow doping. Besides, when the Reynolds number is lower than 150, the temperature uniformity increases to roughly 1.14 times its original value. It provides a good guidance for the microchannel sink to obtain the better heat dissipation efficiency.