Role of a Liquid Accumulator in a Passive Two-Phase Liquid Cooling System for Electronics: Experimental Analysis

Abstract

Gravity-driven two-phase liquid cooling systems using flow boiling within microscale evaporators are becoming a game-changing solution for electronics cooling. The optimization of the system's filling ratio (FR) can however become a challenging problem for a system operating over a wide range of cooling capacities and temperature ranges. The benefits of a liquid accumulator (LA) to overcome this difficulty are evaluated in the present paper. An experimental thermosyphon cooling system was built to cool multiple electronic components up to a power dissipation of 1800 W. A double-ended cylinder with a volume of 150 cm3 is evaluated as the LA for two different system volumes (associated with two different condensers). Results demonstrated that the LA provided robust thermal performance as a function of FR for the entire range of heat loads tested. In addition, the present LA was more effective for a small volume system, 599 cm3, than for a large volume system, 1169 cm3, in which the relative size of the LA increased from 12.8% to 25% of the total system's volume.