Multi-factor analysis on thermal conductive property of metal-polymer composite microstructure heat exchanger

With the rapid development of highly integrated electronic systems, microstructure heat exchangers have attracted more and more attentions according to their advantage of space saving, which can be utilized for the thermal dissipation in high power consumption systems with space limitation. As an important part of microstructure heat exchangers, the research on metal-polymer composite heat exchangers are still not systemic enough. Herein, the influences of several factors, including surface roughness, heating power, structural type of junction surface, thermal conductivity, and installation direction, on thermal conductive properties (e.g., thermal resistance, thermal dissipation performance) of metal-polymer composite microstructure heat exchangers are studied systematically based on the thermodynamic theory. The microstructure heat exchangers provide same thermal dissipation performance using only one-fifth spatial volume of the conventional heat exchangers. Both numerical and experimental methods are performed in this study, and the results are in good agreement. The metal-polymer composite microstructure heat exchangers could become good substitutes of conventional ones attributed to their smaller space requirement.