Entropy Generation and Heat Transfer Performance in Microchannel Cooling

Owing to its relatively high heat transfer performance and simple configurations, liquid cooling remains the preferred choice for electronic cooling and other applications. In this cooling approach, channel design plays an important role in dictating the cooling performance of the heat sink. Most cooling channel studies evaluate the performance in view of the first thermodynamics aspect. This study is conducted to investigate flow behaviour and heat transfer performance of an incompressible fluid in a cooling channel with oblique fins with regards to first law and second law of thermodynamics. The effect of oblique fin angle and inlet Reynolds number are investigated. In addition, the performance of the cooling channels for different heat fluxes is evaluated. The results indicate that the oblique fin channel with 20° angle yields the highest figure of merit, especially at higher Re (250–1000). The entropy generation is found to be lowest for an oblique fin channel with 90° angle, which is about twice than that of a conventional parallel channel. Increasing Re decreases the entropy generation, while increasing heat flux increases the entropy generation.