Mitigation of fluid flow and thermal non-uniformity of nanofluids in microfluidic systems applied to processor chip: a comparative analysis of mass versus thermal mitigation

The present research article focuses on the mitigation of fluid flow and thermal non-uniformity in the microfluidic system resulting in hot spot mitigation in microelectronic devices. A concept of variable size microchannels is extended by implementing the mass and thermal mitigation methods. In the present study, 3-D numerical simulation is carried out to study the problem of fluid flow and thermal non-uniformity of \( \mathrm {Al_{2}O_{3}}\)/water nanofluid with three different nanoparticle concentrations (1–3 vol.%) in the microfluidic system. The computational domain is considered the entire microfluidic system, including parallel microchannels, inlet/outlet manifolds, and ports. Results are analysed and compared for flow and thermal field as well as pressure drop penalty. Results indicate that mass and thermal mitigation are effective methods of obtaining uniform mass distribution and thermal field among all the microchannels. The same brings pumping power penalty due to non-uniform size of the microchannels. It is observed that equalization of fluid velocity among all the microchannels leads to uniform thermal field of the MCHS. If the development of uneven thermal stresses cannot be tolerated in the specific application, the MCHS with thermal mitigation using variable size microchannels is the best design as applied to real-world applications, but at the cost of pumping power penalty.