Numerical and Experimental Analysis of Liquid Cold Plate Thermal Management System for High-Powered Electronics

The efficiency of an integrated circuit, which are building blocks of every modern-day computer, decreases with increase in temperature. This decreases the overall computational efficiency, and therefore, thermal management of these electronic circuit has become a highly researched area in recent years. It is quite evident that the forced convection air-cooling method has lower effectiveness and may not be suitable for industrial applications. In order to overcome this limitation, several alternative cooling methods have been proposed out of which liquid-based systems have been used preferentially primarily due to higher effectiveness and simplicity of construction. In this paper, the performance characteristics of a compact rectangular liquid cold plate-based thermal management system has been studied using numerical simulations and validated with experimental results. This study focuses on the correlation between the flow rate and the surface temperature of the cooling surface of a channel type rectangular cold plate-based liquid cooling system. It was observed that increasing flow rates produced larger deviations due to effects of turbulences and recirculation. Furthermore, numerical simulations revealed that non-uniform flow distribution in channels significantly contributed to various temperature hot spots on the cold plate’s surface.