A case study on innovative design and assessment of a microchannel heat sink with various turbulators arrangements

The design configuration of the microchannel heat sinks plays a critical role in heat transfer improvement. The microchannel geometry has 3D configurations, which is needed to be incorporated into the analysis. The present study focuses on the innovative design of a 3D microchannel with turbulators and evaluates the thermal performance of the resulting channels. The thermal performance analysis relies on the assessment of Nusselt Number, channel base temperature, pressure drop, and friction factor for various flow Reynold numbers within the range of 200–800. In the design configurations, five cases, having different locations of turbulators on the channel wall, are considered and the effect of three different microchannel widths (0.05 mm–0.15 mm) along with different wall heat fluxes (1 × 10⁶ W/m² to 3 × 10⁶ W/m²) is evaluated for each case. The case, at which the turbulators are located on 75% of channel length with a pitch of 0.75 mm, demonstrates the highest thermal performance with the maximum Nusselt number at Reynolds number of 800. However, turbulator location close to the channel exit (Cases 1 and 5) gives rise to the lowest thermal performance.