Jets and rotary flows for single-phase liquid cooling: An overview of some recent experimental findings

Single-phase liquid cooling is increasingly being deployed to cool high power, high heat flux electronic components such as microprocessors. In a conventional liquid cooling loop, the primary heat exchanger represents a key design challenge as this is typically subject to stringent constraints on footprint area and profile. This paper presents some experimental findings for two classes of flows of relevance to the design of primary heat exchangers: impinging jets; and rotary flows associated with a novel integrated pump and exchanger configuration. Hydrodynamic and heat transfer measurements are presented for both classes of flow, revealing the presence of vortical flows which, in some cases, induce enhancements in the local heat transfer rates - a finding of practical relevance.