COUPLED EQUIVALENT CIRCUIT MODEL FOR FLUID FLOW AND HEAT TRANSFER IN LARGE CONNECTED MICROCHANNEL NETWORKS

Abstract

This work presents a reduced equivalent circuit model, which exploits the electric-hydraulic analogy and electric-thermal analogy, to predict the mass flow and temperature distributions in a large connected microchannel network, specifically that of oblique fin array, used in high performance thermal management applications. Methodologies to obtain accurate correlations for calculation of flow-dependent hydraulic `resistances? are developed for both primary and secondary channels in the oblique fin array. Nusselt number correlations and thermal resistance models are also employed to predict the temperature distribution associated with the mass flow distribution. Detailed full-domain numerical simulations are performed to serve as benchmarks. Comparison between the results of simplified model and numerical simulation showed that the simplified model can accurately predict the mass flow distribution and temperature distribution mostly within ?5%. The findings of this work could be used to establish a fast and computationally efficient method to predict the performance of microchannel heat sinks.