On the reticulate pattern and heat transfer performance of the topologically optimized microchannel heat sink

With the increasing integration of electronic devices, the rapid heat dissipation has become a key challenge for performance improvement. In this work, a 2D topology optimization for the channel pattern of a microchannel heat sink is conducted, and a novel reticulate pattern of optimized design of microchannel heat sink is found based on the theoretical and numerical analysis. This pattern has tertiary ranked reticulate channels resulting from the topology optimization, which are highly related to the convection heat transfer of fluid and the conduction in solid. The reticulate channels could significantly optimize the total number of channels in the heat sink, and accordingly regulate the flow distribution among the channels. The profiles of the temperature gradients and velocity exhibit high similarity in all reticulate channels, and lead to a synergistic enhancement of heat transfer. A full scale 3D simulation shows that the reticulate microchannel heat sink has better heat transfer performance than the other optimized heat sinks. With pressure drop of 1 kPa, the heat flux for the reticulate microchannel heat sink can reach up to 405 W/cm2, and its performance evaluation criteria (PEC) can reach up to 3.7.