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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 the present study, thermal performance of a microchannel heat sink with superhydrophobic walls is studied for different ratios of the wall convergence. To this end, three-dimensional Navier-Stokes equations and energy equation subject to the slip boundary conditions, viz. velocity slip and temperature jump, are numerically solved using the finite volume method. Then, the variations of thermal resistance of the heat sink with the number of channels, width- and height-tapered ratios, are studied for a fixed pumping power. The results show that by utilizing the superhydrophobic walls, the optimum width-tapered ratio of the channel is higher than that of the hydrophilic walls. The accentuated effect of the number of channels on thermal performance in the presence of liquid-solid interfacial slip weakens the effect of converging the width of the channel. It is also revealed that the optimum number of channels also increases to give prominence to the effect of interfacial slip by diminishing the smallest dimension of the channel. Finally, it is shown that for a pumping power of 0.05 W, using a heat sink with converging microchannels and superhydrophobic walls, reduces the overall thermal resistance by 28 percent, compared to that with conventional microchannels. In fact, the increase in fluid flow rate resulting from the use of converging microchannels with superhydrophobic walls outweighs the undesirable effect of temperature jump on heat transfer, in a sense that the heat sink performance augments considerably.