Methods and techniques of improving experimental testing for microfluidic heat sinks

There exist numerous methods of experimentally testing designs for heat sinks in the laboratory, especially for microscale fluidic devices, which can lead to a problem for comparison between new studies and those in the literature. To explore this issue, laboratory-based experiments on the heat transfer and flow impedance properties of a sample microchannel heat sink were repeated over a varying range of equipment. Three types of heat source (hot plate, film heater and copper block with cartridge heaters), two types of piping (polymer and metal), and the presence or absence of manifolds were investigated and the differences in heat sink performance were noted.Overall, especially in terms of achieving consistent, repeatable results, it was found that the arrangement of copper block heater, metal piping and the inclusion of manifolds was superior for this particular microchannel device. Hence, it is suggested that future testing of heat sinks and heat exchanger devices employ a similar arrangement of equipment for greater accuracy and comparability. In particular, the plastic tubing and hot plate configurations were found to have relatively poor consistency when testing the heat sink, and the film heater produced non-uniform heating, even over a small surface area.