Introduction

There is a pressing demand for ultra high performance microprocessors to tackle the ever increasing data streams. These high performance microprocessors are responsible for smart and powerful computers in use today. But the increased performance of microprocessors means that more electronic needs to be packed in chips that keep on reducing in size. Increasing circuit density in computer chips leads to a high heat generation rate which calls for better thermal management techniques. Air cooling of microchips has been in use for many years, it is effective but it has reached its limit in heat removing capabilities. Further increase in the performance of air cooling means the heat sink size needs to be increased and oversized fans are needed to circulate air through these heat sinks. These oversized systems are impractical to be installed in commercial CPUs. Therefore to better tackle the problem of effective thermal management of high heat flux chips, liquid cooling is in use for quite a some time now. Liquid cooled microchannels were first proposed by some researchers at Stanford. Till then many experiments have been carried out to study the performance of liquid cooled heat sinks.

Even though liquid cooling is more effective as compared to air cooling, yet the heat removal by a heat sink is limited by the thermal capabilities of the coolant circulating within it. Water and ethylene glycol are the commonly used heat transfer fluids and their thermal conductivities are very low. Therefore to further enhance the performance of heat sinks it is necessary to use coolants with better heat transfer characteristics. Suspending solid particles in liquids is known to increase the thermal conductivity of the resulting solution. Over the years micro and millimeter sized metallic and non metallic particles have been added to heat transfer fluids in an attempt to increase their performance.

Liquid cooled systems involve pumps, radiators and pipes, the circulation of mili/micro sized particles through these components cause abrasion, erosion and sedimentation problems hence making the system impractical. Using millimeter of micro sized particles also causes a large pressure loss penalty which means pumps with higher power ratings need to be used; affecting the economics of the system.

The solution to all of the above mentioned problems is to use specifically engineered nanometer sized particles in different base fluids. These nanoparticles suspended in base fluids are called nanofluids. When proper surfactants are used nanoparticles are stable for a long period of time. Nanofluids were pioneered by Choi while working at Argonne national laboratory .

Nanoparticles are known to enhance the heat transfer capabilities of the base fluid several times. The most apparent difference between nanofluids and ordinary base fluids like water and ethylene glycol is the difference in thermal conductivities. Nanofluids have higher thermal conductivities than the pure base fluids.

Enhanced thermal conductivity of base fluids as a result of nanoparticles is not the only reason for better heat transfer capabilities of nanofluids but several other factors determine the thermal properties of nanofluids. The enhancement in convective heat transfer coefficient by using nanofluids is of greater interest than the enhancement in thermal conductivity. The reason behind this is that nearly all practical heat transfer equipment use forced or natural convection as a cooling method.

Nanofluids have proved to be a success as heat transfer fluids because they dont produce extra pressure loss or cause erosion or abrasion of the heat transfer equipment. Many researchers have investigated both experimentally and numerically the performance of nanofluids in heat sinks of different types.

Heat transfer correlations especially for Nusselt no, for conventional single phase systems cannot be extended to nanofluids. Many researchers have developed some correlations based on empirical and numerical simulations. The correlations based on empirical data are more realistic as they take in to account the actual working conditions.

Nanofluids for computer cooling applications are gaining a lot of attention as a lot of researchers have tried to study the effect of using nanofluids in commercial cooling systems.