Numerical Investigation of Electronic Cooling with Phase Change Material

With the rapid advancement of microprocessor speed and performance, the requirement for effective microprocessor cooling becomes prominent to maintain the processor optimum performance and integrity. This study investigates laminar heat transfer performance of a novel electronic liquid cooling with phase change material as thermal capacitor by adopting computational fluid dynamics approach. Two cooling channel designs are evaluated, i.e. parallel and serpentine channels with phase change material. The effect of phase change material and cooling channel configuration will be investigated. In addition, the effect of channel inlet Reynolds number is evaluated for liquid cooling channel with and without phase change material. The result indicates that the additional phase change material in a cooling channel does offer superior cooling performance, indicated by the lower average temperature than that without PCM. Consistent with other studies, convective heat transfer is increased with increasing Reynolds number. On the channel design, the serpentine channel offers better heat transfer performance with the penalty of higher pressure drop and thus higher pumping power than parallel channel.