An experimental study of air and mist cooling of microchannels on IC chips

Abstract

This paper describes an experimental study of air and mist cooling of microchannels fabricated on the back of a silicon chip. A rig was designed and fabricated for the experimental study. The test section consisted of a 21mm × 21mm square silicon die with 100μm-wide microchannels etched on its back surface, which were covered with a glass plate to confine the flow through the microchannels. A slot was machined across the glass cover plate to admit air from an inlet manifold. The performance of an air-water mist spray cooling system was also studied experimentally. It was found that an air-water mist spray cooling system can give a higher cooling rate than air-only slot-impingement cooling of microchannels. For the same heat dissipation, it was found that the air-water mist spray cooling system required a much smaller flow rate of air. Comparing with data available in the literature, it was also found that mist cooling of microchannels was much more effective than on plane surfaces. © 2006 IEEE.