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Effects of different inlet/outlet arrangements on thermal performance of porous microchannel heat sink MCHS of any geometry has not been studied yet. In this investigation, the effects of utilization of four different inlet/outlet arrangements on electronic chip cooling utilizing trapezoidal MCHS with porous microchannels with porosity of 0.88 have been studied numerically. For this purpose, three dimensional simulations of laminar forced convection flow in microchannels and conduction in solid parts of MCHS by applying constant heat flux of 150 kWm-2 at its base plate have been performed utilizing the finite volume method and the commercial Ansys-CFX code. The results show that the A- and B-type arrangements, for wich the inlet and outlet are in direction of flow in the microchannels, have a better heat transfer performance, smaller thermal resistance and provide more uniform temperature distribution in the MCHS base plate. The results indicate that using porous media is effective in reducing the MCHS base plate temperature and in this regard the D-type arrangement has the best performance among the heat sinks studied. Considering both the positive effect of using porous media on increasing the heat transfer coefficient and its negative effect on increasing the required pumping power, the A-type arrangement has the best performance.

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In this numerical study, three dimensional laminar flow, heat transfer and other thermal characteristics of a microchannel heat sink, consisting of seven isosceles triangular microchannels, have been investigated. For this purpose, conduction in the solid parts has been considered and two different horizontal inlet/outlet (I-type) and vertical inlet/outlet (U-type) arrangements have been considered. Simulations have been performed for a constant heat flux of 125 kWm-2 entering from the substrate. In previous studies flow of water in rectangular microchannles has been considered, but in this study CuO-water nanofluid has been utilized. The effects of the Brownian motion of nanoparticles and variation of thermophysical properties of the nanaofluid with termperature have been considered and their importances studied. The results show that with increasing pressure drop, the heat sink performance in terms of heat transfer, thermal resistance and uniform temperature distribution at subtrate improves for the two nominated arrangements. Also increasing the volume fraction to 2% improves the heat sink performance, but as it increases further the thermal resistance and the non-uniformity of temperature at the bottom plate enlarge with no heat transfer improvement. Making comparison with the results of the previous studies on the effect of inlet/outlet arrangement proves that the thermal performance is affected by both of the inlet/outlet arrangement as well as the shape and geometry of the microchannels. For the heat sink of this study with triangular microchannels the performance of the I-type arrangement is better than the U-type arrangement.