In the Information Age, society has become accustomed to continuous, rapid advances in electronics technology. As the power density of these devices increases, heat dissipation threatens to become the limiting factor for growth in the electronics industry. In order to sustain rapid growth, the development of advanced thermal management strategies to efficiently dissipate heat from electronics is imperative. Porous wicks are of great interest in thermal management because they are capable of passively supplying liquid for thin film evaporation, a promising method to reliably dissipate heat in high-performance electronics. While the maximum heat flux that can be reliably sustained (the dryout heat flux) has been well-characterized for many wick configurations, key design information is missing as many previous models cannot determine the distribution of evaporator surface temperature nor temperature at the evaporator's interface with electronic components.
 
Temperature gradients are inherent to the passive capillary pumping mechanism since the shape of the liquid-vapor interface is a function of the local liquid pressure, causing spatial variation of permeability and the heat transfer coefficient (HTC). Accounting for the variation of the liquid-vapor interface to determine the resulting temperature gradients has been a significant modeling challenge. In this thesis, we present a comprehensive modeling framework for thin film evaporation in micropillar wicks that can predict dryout heat flux and local temperature simultaneously. Our numerical approach captures the effect of varying interfacial curvature across the micropillar evaporator to determine the spatial distributions of temperature and heat flux. Heat transfer and capillary flow in the wick are coupled in a computationally efficient manner via incorporation of parametric studies to relate geometry and interface shape to local permeability and HTC.
 
While most previous models only consider uniform thermal loads, our model offers the flexibility to consider arbitrary (non-uniform) thermal loads, making it suitable to guide the design of porous wick evaporators for cooling realistic electronic devices. We present case studies from our model that underscore its capability to guide design with respect to temperature and dryout heat flux. This model predicts notable variations of the HTC (-30%) across the micropillar wick, highlighting the significant effects of interfacial curvature that have not been considered previously. We demonstrate the model's capability to simulate non-uniform thermal loads and show that wick configuration with respect to the input thermal distribution has a significant effect on performance due to the distribution of the HTC and capillary pressure. Further, we are able to quantify the tradeoff associated with enhancing either dryout heat flux or the HTC by optimizing geometry.
 
We offer insights into optimization and further analyze the effects of micropillar geometry on the HTC. Finally, we integrate this model into a fast, compact thermal model (CTM) to make it suitable for thermal/electronics codesign of high-performance devices and demonstrate a thermal simulation of a realistic microprocessor using this CTM. We discuss further uses of our model and describe an experimental platform that could validate our predicted temperature distributions. Lastly, we propose a biporous, area-enhanced wick structure that could push thermal performance to new limits by overcoming the design challenge typically associated with porous wick evaporators.
https://dspace.mit.edu/handle/1721.1/128335