Cooling of electronic system: From electronic chips to data centers.

摘要

In this work, the physical problems associated with heat removal of electronic systems at different scales were studied. Various electronic cooling system designs and specific cooling techniques to improve performance were discussed. Optimization procedures and suggestion for better design was proposed.;This study consisted of two main parts. The first part was from the microscale aspect, where single phase liquid cooling in different multi-microchannel heat sink configurations was studied experimentally and numerically. The effects of flow separation and flow redirection on the microchannel heat sink cooling performance were investigated. A multi-objective optimization problem was formulated based on both experimental and numerical results and was solved numerically with and without physical constraint. The Pareto frontiers were presented to provide quantitative guidance for the process of design and optimization.;The second part of the study involved cooling of larger dimension electronic systems, which focused on the cooling of data centers. The temperature and flow distribution in a data center for both steady state and transient state were studied. The energy consumption of the cooling system with different running conditions was analyzed. Based on the investigation of the thermal response of the data center cooling system to sudden power increase caused by dynamic load migration, pre-cooling concept with dynamic load migration was investigated to generate a robust, reliable, more efficient and energy-conservative design.