Refrigerant direct cooling thermal management optimization with leaf vein bionic designed cold plates

Based on the bionic principles and fractal theory, leaf vein bionic channels with typical Z/I/U arrangements are designed to address the challenge of heat dissipation under high thermal loads in electronic devices. The coupled effects of bionic channel stage number, graded channel width, and main transport channel inclination angle on refrigerant direct cooling performance are numerically studied. The results show that all three types of conventional parallel channel cold plates exhibit significant temperature and flow distribution non-uniformities, while the leaf vein bionic channel cold plates demonstrate improved cooling uniformity and efficiency across different flow rates and Z/I/U arrangements. The temperature control and uniformity of Z-shaped and U-shaped bionic channel cold plates are significantly improved by increasing bionic channel stage number. Additionally, increasing bionic channel width notably reduces the pressure drop (Δp), while the effect of main transport channel inclination angle depends on the cold plate arrangement. For U-shaped channel with the greatest improvement, the maximum temperature (T_max), maximum temperature difference (ΔT), and Δp are reduced by up to 24.42 K, 23.20 K and 677.58 Pa, under the study conditions, respectively. And for I-shaped channel with the best cooling performance, the T_max, ΔT and Δp are reduced by up to 5.27 K, 5.68 K and 943.38 Pa, respectively. Overall, the proposed leaf vein bionic cold plates with refrigerant direct cooling effectively solve the uneven flow distribution and insufficient cooling in parallel channel cold plates, thereby enhancing thermal management performance and providing valuable guidance for designing advanced cooling systems for electronic devices.