Text

theses

Many biological systems providing very high heat and mass transfer rates in organs such as brain, liver, and lungs use microchannels and minichannels. A few years back transport in small channels gained ground due to the high heat transfer rates. Since then a lot of research has been done on heat transfer in microchannels both experimentally and numerically. The analysis done minichannels is mainly experimental and very less literature exists on numerical analysis done on heat transfer in minichannels. Some work that exists, considers short channels with aspect ratios in the range of 0.3 to 0.5. Moreover, the work done prior to this work considered considerably lower imposed heat fluxes. The experimental work done on minichannel heat sinks also considers short sinks with heat flux in the order of 40kW/m2. Hence, in this study the focus is on minichannels with an aspect ratio of the order of 0.01 and with very high heat flux imposed, of the order of 700 kW/m2. The analysis is done for three as well as two-dimensional channels. Three different channels of height 1 mm, 2 mm and 3 mm are analyzed and the results of the analysis are studied. The pressure drop across the heat sink is also reported. The temperature drop across the heat sink is reported and found to be minimum for the channel with height 3 mm for a three-dimensional channel.

ETD_8468

M.S.

Includes bibliographical references

by Kalyan Inamdar

doi:10.7282/T3RF5Z4P

ETD graduate

The author owns the copyright to this work.