Effect of fin arrangement on pressure drop characteristics of two-phase flow in a finned rectangular channel.

In recent years, there has been a need for cooling technology that can deal with the increasing heat generation by the miniaturized high output electronic devices. A finned heat sink with boiling cooling is considered to be a promising method that can cool those electronic devices efficiently. However, as the heat transfer increases, the void fraction between fins increases, leading to the increase in the pressure drop through a finned heat sink. The increasing pressure drop may result in the deterioration of the heat transfer efficiency. So, it is important to estimate the pressure drop through the finned heat sink. Though various researchers have already studied the pressure drop of the finned heat sink, however, the pressure drop evaluation model for the finned heat sink has not been established enough. In this study, first, the pressure drop through a finned heat sink with the single-/two-phase flow is measured, and then, the finned heat sink is regarded as a type of a packed bed system to obtain a universal evaluation model of pressure drop based on well-known Ergun/Lipinski models.