Identification of Nucleate Boiling as the Dominant Heat Transfer Mechanism during Confined Two-Phase Jet Impingement

Abstract

Abstract Thermal management of high-power electronics requires cooling strategies capable of dissipating high heat fluxes while maintaining the device at low operating temperatures. Two-phase jet impingement offers a compact cooling technology capable of meeting these requirements at a low pressure drop. Generally, confined impingement geometries are used in electronics cooling applications, where the flow is constrained between the hot surface and orifice plate. Understanding the primary heat transfer mechanisms occurring as boiling takes place on the surface during jet impingement is important, specifically under such confined conditions. In this study, heat transfer from a copper surface is experimentally characterized in both confined jet impingement and pool boiling configurations. The dielectric liquid HFE-7100 is used as the working fluid. For the jet impingement configuration, the jet issues through a single 2\u202fmm-diameter orifice, at jet exit velocities of 1, 3, 6, and 9\u202fm/s, into a confinement gap with a spacing of 3 jet diameters between the orifice and heat source. Additional orifice-to-target spacings of 0.5, 1, and 10 jet diameters are tested at the lowest (Vj\u202f=\u202f1\u202fm/s) and highest (Vj\u202f=\u202f9\u202fm/s) jet velocities. By incrementing the heat flux applied to the surface and observing the steady-state response at each flux, the single-phase and two-phase heat transfer performance is characterized; all experiments were carried through to critical heat flux conditions. The jet impingement data in the fully boiling regime either directly overlap the pool boiling data, or coincide with an extension of the trend in pool boiling data beyond the pool boiling critical heat flux limit. This result confirms that nucleate boiling is the dominant heat transfer mechanism in the fully boiling regime in confined jet impingement; the convective effects of the jet play a negligible role over the wide range of parameters considered here. While the presence of the jet does not enhance the boiling heat transfer coefficient, the jet does greatly increase single-phase heat transfer performance and extends the critical heat flux limit. Critical heat flux displays a linear dependence on jet velocity while remaining insensitive to changes in the orifice-to-target spacing.