A Combined Liquid Cold Plate and Heat Sink Based Hybrid Cooling Approach for the Temperature Control of Integrated Circuit Chips

Abstract

The study focuses on the experimental and numerical investigations on the cooling of seven protruding asymmetric integrated circuit (IC) chips arranged optimally at various positions in a switch mode power supply (SMPS) board. The chips are cooled under the laminar forced convection mode using the hybrid cooling technique (liquid cold plate integrated with the heat sinks). Fifteen heat sink cases (combinations) are considered for the analysis with the goal to keep the IC chip’s temperature under the safe limit (less than 100 °C). Variable power (heat) inputs to the IC chips along with a water flow rate of 0.5 kg/s (corresponding to the velocity of 4 m/s) inside the liquid cold plate are considered for the analysis. The heat sinks absorb the heat dissipated from the IC chips and reduce their temperature substantially by enhancing their heat removal rate up to 32%. The convection contribution of the IC chips has also improved by 62% using the heat sinks. Hence, hybrid cooling is found to be an effective technique for the temperature control of the IC chips. Numerical analyses are also carried out using the ansys fluent (v r16) to support the experiments. Both the results agree with each other in the error band of 6–12%.