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ISSN Online: 2379-1748

ISBN Flash Drive: 978-1-56700-472-4

ISBN Online: 978-1-56700-471-7

3rd Thermal and Fluids Engineering Conference (TFEC)
March, 4–7, 2018, Fort Lauderdale, FL, USA

TURBULENT HEAT TRANSFER IN A TWO-PHASE CUBICAL HEAT SINK

Get access (open in a dialog) pages 271-281
DOI: 10.1615/TFEC2018.cfd.021457

Abstract

This paper presents a new design for heat sinks. The idea is to have a heat sink constructed from a cubical cavity partially filled with a liquid coolant. The top surface of the cavity is attached to a heat source, while the lateral surfaces are maintained at low temperature. The coolant is a mixture of water and air. One vertical wall of the cavity moves at constant speed, providing upward motion to the coolant. As a result, a turbulent two-phase flow is established that extracts heat from the heat source and rejects it through the lateral walls of the heat sink. The turbulent flow and heat transfer are modeled using Large Eddy Simulation (LES), and Volume-Of-Fluid (VOF) is employed for interface tracking. The computations are performed using OpenFOAM as a base solver on computer clusters using parallel computing. Computations reveal complex flow and thermal fields. The results presented in this paper include instantaneous flow and thermal fields and heat rate for heat sinks for different amounts of coolant. It is shown that heat transfer is enhanced up to 33% when the total volume of water is 25% of the cavity volume. It is also found that when volume of water exceeds 33%, the enhancement either diminishes or even suppresses heat transfer by 10%.