Conduction and entrance effects on laminar liquid flow and heat transfer in rectangular microchannels

The paper presents both three and two-dimensional numerical analysis of convective heat transfer in microchannels. The three-dimensional geometry of the microchannel heat sink followed the details of the experimental facility used during a previous research step. The heat sink consisted of a very high aspect ratio rectangular microchannel. Two channel spacings, namely 1 mm and 0.3 mm (0.1 mm), were used for three-dimensional (two-dimensional) numerical model, respectively. Water was employed as the cooling liquid. The Reynolds number ranged from 200 to 3000. In the paper, thermal entrance effects and conduction/convection coupling effects are considered both for the test case of uniform channel inlet conditions and the complete geometry of the experiment. Finally, the comparison between measured and computed heat flux and temperature fields is presented. Contrary to the experimental work, the numerical analysis did not reveal any significant scale effect on heat transfer in microchannel heat sink down to the smallest size considered (0.1 mm).