Enhanced boiling heat transfer over a silicon chip in a natural circulation loop

For efficiently cooling electronic components, experiments were conducted to study the boiling heat transfer performance of FC-72 over micro-pin-finned silicon chips in a natural circulation loop system. Two micro-pin-finned chips having the same fin thickness of 30μm and different fin height of 60 and 200μm, respectively, were tested. The liquid subcoolings were set to 10, 25 and 35 K respectively. For the two micro-pin-finned chips, the boiling curves for all subcoolings showed a sharp increase in heat flux with increasing wall superheat and the wall temperature at the critical heat flux was less than the upper limit for the reliable operation of LSI chips, 85°C, which were similar to those for pool boiling. However, the critical heat flux was lower for the natural circulation loop.