Performance Enhancement of Cold Plate with Groove-mesh Composite Structure for Direct Refrigerant Cooling

doi:10.3901/JME.260471

Abstract

Abstract: A novel refrigerant direct cooling plate integrated with a grooved-mesh composite structure for capillary adsorption is proposed to address the issues of unstable working fluid operation, excessively high peak temperature, and poor temperature uniformity. The grooved-mesh composite structure is fabricated on the flow channel surface of the refrigerant cooling plate via high-temperature sintering combined with laser processing. A capillary rise test platform under vacuum environment was specifically designed and established to evaluate the capillary performance of the composite structure, while the capillary isothermal operational performance of this grooved-mesh composite structure in the refrigerant direct cooling flow channels is also verified through systematic experiments. The results show that the grooved-mesh composite structure processed by laser is composed of multi-level cavity structures and array grooves with micro-particles and nano-fuzz on the surface. Compared with the sintered mesh structure, its capillary performance can be increased by up to about one times. In addition, compared with the unprocessed cooling plate flow channels, the maximum surface temperatures of the flow channels equipped with wire mesh structure (#100) and grooved-wire mesh composite structure (#100@WL) are reduced by about 5 ℃ and 3 ℃, respectively. Notably, the maximum heat source temperatures for both #100 and #100@WL configurations are decreased by approximately 5 ℃ compared to the unprocessed structure. Meanwhile, both the #100 and #100@WL structures enabled the temperature difference across the cooling plate surface to be reduced to below 5 ℃, with the #100@WL composite structure achieving an even lower temperature difference of less than 3 ℃.

Key words: grooved-mesh composite structure, refrigerant direct cooling plate, high-temperature sintering, laser processing, capillary performance

CLC Number:

TK124

WU Chunxia, TANG Yong, WU Hebin, LIU Yanpei, TANG Heng. Performance Enhancement of Cold Plate with Groove-mesh Composite Structure for Direct Refrigerant Cooling[J]. Journal of Mechanical Engineering, 2026, 62(14): 269-279.

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URL: http://www.cjmenet.com.cn/EN/10.3901/JME.260471

http://www.cjmenet.com.cn/EN/Y2026/V62/I14/269

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