Experimental Investigation of Compact Evaporators for Ultralow Temperature Refrigeration of Microprocessors

Microprocessor performance can be significantly improved by lowering the junction temperature, especially down to the deep subambient levels. This provides the strong motivation for the current study, which focuses on the design and thermohydraulic performance evaluation of high heat flux evaporators suitable for interfacing the microprocessor chip with a cascaded R134a∕R508b vapor compression refrigeration system at −80°C. Four compact evaporator designs are examined—a base line slit-flow structure with no microfeatures, straight microchannels, an inline pin fin array, and an alternating pin fin array—all fitting the same size envelope. Pressure drop and heat transfer measurements are reported and discussed to explain the performance of the various evaporator geometries for heat fluxes ranging between 20W∕cm2 and 100W∕cm2.