Numerical simulation of conjugate heat transfer in electronic cooling and analysis based on field synergy principle

In this paper, the conjugate heat transfer in electronic cooling is numerically simulated with the newly proposed algorithm CLEARER on collocated grid. Because the solid heat source and substrate are isolated from the boundary, special attention is given to deal with the velocity and temperature in the solid region in the full field computation. The influence of openings on the substrate, heat source height and their distribution along the substrate on the maximum temperature and overall Nusselt number is investigated. The numerical results show that the openings on the substrate can enhance the heat transfer as well as increasing the heat source height, meanwhile, by arranging the heat sources coarsely in the front part and densely in the rear part of the substrate, the thermal performance can also be increased. Then the results are analyzed from the viewpoint of field synergy principle, and it is shown that the heat transfer improvement can all be attributed to the better synergy between the velocity field and temperature field, which may offer some guidance in the design of electronic devices. (c) 2007 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.