| A microchannel heat sink, integrated with pressure and temperature microsensors, was fabricated to study convective boiling under uniform heat flux boundary condition. Utilizing a wafer bond and etch back technology, the heat source, temperature and pressure sensors were separated from the fluid flow by a membrane only 1.5mum in thickness; thus allowing good control of the thermal boundary conditions. Temperature and pressure distributions for various power levels and flow rates were measured. Single-phase liquid flow results, compared with numerical simulations, confirm that the heat flux boundary condition is indeed nearly uniform. The sensor arrays, particularly for two-phase flow, provide the spatial and temporal dependence of both the temperature and pressures fields. During two-phase flow, a pressure peak appears at the location of the liquid-vapor interface region. Simultaneously, qualitative visualizations of the evolving flow patterns have been correlated with quantitative temperature and pressure measurements. Based on the temperature and pressure measurements inside the microchannels, the empirical correlations of local pressure fluctuation frequency and pressure fluctuation amplitude are found to increase with increasing input power and Suratman number, but with decreasing Reynolds number. A flow regime map is plotted to distinguish the different kinds of flow pattern in microchannels.; Moreover, the activity of nucleation sites as well as the ensuing bubble dynamics, from incipience to departure, was found to depend on the channel height. The critical size for active nucleation site increases with increasing microchannel height. Furthermore, size and shape effects on two-phase flow patterns in forced convection boiling were investigated in near rectangular microchannels with silicon substrate. Although detected, in contrast with triangular microchannels, annular flow was observed to be unstable. Instead, the dominant flow pattern was an unsteady transition region connecting an upstream vapor zone to a downstream liquid zone with an average location depending on the input power. A physical mechanism based on the force balance across the vapor-liquid interface, and the development of a restoring force, is proposed to explain the flow visualization results. |
