Microchannels: Rapid Growth of a Nascent Technology

Abstract

It gives me great pleasure in presenting this special issue of the ASME Journal of Heat Transfer with focus on microchannels. Although not new in the biological field, the real impetus of their use in engineering systems was provided by the pioneering work of Tuckerman and Pease (1) in the early 1980s. Interest was renewed beginning in the late 1990s with the need to remove higher heat fluxes from electronic chips. Major efforts on microscale transport phenomena were undertaken worldwide by the advent of the twenty-first century. The birth of what is now an ASME International Conference on Nanochannels, Microchannels and Minichannels (ICNMM) in June 2003 provided a forum for interdisciplinary activities in this field. The promise of microchannels in future technologies, as highlighted in an editorial “Microchannels—Short History and Bright Future” by Kandlikar (2), is a result of the convergence of different application interests. Today, within a span of less than a decade, there are over four conferences held every year that focus on microchannels, and many sessions are devoted to this topic in any general heat transfer conference. This special issue is largely a collection of papers presented at a recent ICNMM09 conference held in Darmstadt, Germany.