Enhanced and Predictable Dielectric Spray Cooling for High-heat-flux Electronic Devices

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The continued advance in electronics has generated increasingly challenging thermal issues due to the rising number of devices packaged in tightened space. This has lead to increasing demand for effective cooling solutions capable of dissipating enormous amounts of heat through small areas and keeping active devices within their operating temperature ranges. This research program will develop innovative dielectric spray cooling with enhanced cooling capacity to solve the high-heat-flux thermal challenges in many cutting-edge technologies, including supercomputers, power conversion/inversion and distribution systems, medical imaging equipment, electric vehicles, ground/space-based lasers and radars, and earth science satellites, to name a few. Extensive and systematic experimental studies supported by theoretical analysis and numerical simulation will be conducted to investigate the relationships of cooling performance with spray dynamics, surface characteristics and coolant properties. Cooling capacity will be enhanced by optimizing spray dynamics and integrating nanotechnologies into spray cooling. Nanofabrication will be applied to fabricate nanometer-scale textures on cooling surfaces to enhance spray-surface interactions. Nanoparticles will be mixed with dielectric coolants to develop nanofluid coolants with enhanced heat transport properties. Fundamental understanding of fluid dynamics and heat transfer obtained through the experiments will enable the development of a general analytical model for cooling capacity prediction, which is highly useful for the application of dielectric spray cooling. This research will benefit many high-technology industries in Canada such as microelectronics, power electronics, aviation and defence industries. Technology advances achieved in the research will be transitioned to application development through active collaborations with industry. This program will train a group of engineers with expertise in thermal control and spray cooling.