Abstract: Under a constant pumping power of 0.05 W for water-cooled micro heat sinks, a semi-normalized 3-dimensional heat transfer model has been used to simulate the heat transfer performance of copper-based and aluminum-based parallel microchannel heat sinks and optimize the geometric structure of these types of micro heat sinks. The model is validated by comparing the predicted results with previously published experimental results. And the effect of the microchannel geometry on the temperature distribution in the microchannel heat sink is presented and discussed. The results turn out to be that optimal microchannel geometry is the microchannel number of 100 per centimeter, a channel width of 90 μm and a channel depth of about 580 μm for copper-based microchannel heat sinks and the microchannel number of 100 per centimeter, a channel width of 80 μm and a channel depth of about 620 μm for aluminum-based microchannel heat sinks.

Key words: Numerical simulation, Microchannel heat sink, Optimization, Water cooling