Comparative experimental study of heat sinks with piezoelectric pump

How to effectively cool highly integrated electronic devices is a hot and challenging research problem. To improve the cooling performance of microchannel systems, a new piezoelectric pump-based cooling system is proposed in the paper, which includes a piezoelectric pump with umbrella-shaped valves and microchannel-based heat sinks. We theoretically analyzed the effects of flow rates and heat transfer coefficients on the cooling performance when using four different types of microchannel-based heat sinks. Then, the piezoelectric pump and those heat sinks were fabricated, and the maximum output flow rate was experimentally measured. A CPU with a fixed power input was chosen to experimentally access the overall heat transfer coefficient of the heat sinks. The theoretical and experimental results revealed that the cooling performance of the proposed system was related to both the output flow rate and the overall heat transfer coefficient of the heat sinks. At last, we demonstrated that the piezoelectric cooling system, equipped with the heat sink of the tandem Y-shape bifurcation microchannel, had the best cooling performance: the CPU temperature was stabilized within 60.6 °C when the working power of the CPU was fixed at 30 W, resulting in a cooling efficiency up to 51.12%.