CONVECTIVE HEAT-TRANSFER AND PRESSURE-DROP CHARACTERISTICS OF VARIOUSARRAY CONFIGURATIONS TO SIMULATE THE COOLING OF ELECTRONIC MODULES

This paper reports an experimental investigation to explore the effect s of the size of modules, the presence of a cylindrical module and the missing module on the heat transfer coefficient and pressure drop cha racteristics of array configurations composed of individual rectangula r modules for three different Reynolds numbers namely; 1690, 2250 and 2625. Generally, it was found that using different sizes or shapes of modules in an array configuration tends to increase the Nusselt number by as much as 40% for the rectangular module and 28% for the cylindri cal module. The presence of a missing module in the array resulted in a 37% enhancement in the Nusselt number downstream the missing module. Pressure drop results indicate that large size modules tend to enhanc e the pressure drop at their row locations by as much as 15%, while th e cylindrical module tends to attenuate the pressure drop especially a t low Reynolds number. Copyright (C) 1996 Elsevier Science Ltd.