Performance Investigation of Microchannel Heat Sink with Biomimetic Trefoil Cavities on Different Walls

The modern world is shifting towards digitalization and miniaturization, leading to higher flux densities in electronic components and machines. However, conventional cooling methods, such as air-cooled smooth channels, are proving inadequate for removing the huge amounts of heat generated, thereby compromising the reliability and operational lifespan of electronic systems. This necessitates urgently exploring and analyzing modern techniques like microchannel cooling to improve its efficiency. This work uses ANSYS to conduct numerical simulations and investigates the heat transfer and flow behavior in a microchannel heat sink. The smooth channel is used to investigate and validate the flow behavior with the available literature. Moreover, a biomimetic design using trefoil cavity was mounted on different walls of smooth channels to see the performance improvement. The performance comparison of a smooth channel with a cavity channel was made by utilizing the heat transfer coefficient, Nusselt number, friction factor, pressure drop, thermal enhancement factor, thermal resistance, and thermal transport efficiency. The study reveals that adding trefoil cavities has improved the performance of the microchannel heat sink. Furthermore, it was observed that the addition of trefoil cavities to the base wall (MC-BWTC) has superior performance than that of side wall (MC-SWTC) and all wall trefoil cavities (MC-AWTC). Specifically, MC-BWTC increases the overall performance of smooth channel by 31 %, MC-SWTC by 21 %, and MC-AWTC by 17 %, respectively.