Investigation on the CPU nanofluid cooling

• CPU water cooling is investigated experimentally and numerically by CFD commercial package ANSYS Fluent 13.
• Water and nanofluid CuO-water at two solid concentrations of 0.86 and 2.25 vol.% were used.
• 115 W and 130 W CPU were investigated.
• Up to 7.7% heat transfer improvement in thermal conductance is observed in case of nanofluids in comparison to water.

The small physical size of electronic equipment, space limitation for installing air-cooling systems and high heat flux produced from a single chip have attracted a great deal of interest in more efficient heat dissipation equipment such as high-performance liquid cooling systems and mini-rectangular fin heat sinks. In this study, the influence of nanofluids on the performance of heat sink for CPU cooling is investigated experimentally and numerically. The former is carried out for water and nanofluid CuO-water at two solid concentrations of 0.86 and 2.25 vol.%. While in the latter, numerical simulations are validated for the laminar flow model with the application of the commercial package ANSYS Fluent 13. For the investigated range of mass flow rate and heat load (115 and 130 W), up to 7.7% of thermal conductance improvement is observed in case of nanofluids in comparison to water. The results of this study pave the way for more credible designs of cooling systems of electronic devices to promote a high-performance and longer life cycle.