INVESTIGATION OF NON-DARCIAN FORCED-CONVECTION IN AN ASYMMETRICALLY HEATED SINTERED POROUS CHANNEL

A study of non-Darcian forced convection in an asymmetric heating sint ered porous channel is carried our to investigate the feasibility of u sing this channel as a heat sink for high-performance forced air cooli ng in microelectronics. A volume-averaging technique is applied to obt ain the macroscopic equations with the non-Darcian effects of no-slip boundary, flow inertia, and thermal dispersion. Local non-thermal-equi librium is assumed between the solid and the fluid phases. The analysi s reveals that the particle Reynolds number significantly affects the solid-to-fluid heat transfer coefficients. A wall function is introduc ed to model the transverse thermal dispersion process for the wall eff ect on the lateral mixing of fluid. The local heat transfer coefficien t at the inlet is modeled by a modified impinging jet result, and the noninsulated thermal condition is considered at exit. The numerical re sults are found to be with the experimental results in the ranges of 3 2 less than or equal to Re-d less than or equal to 428 and q = 0.8 sim ilar to 3.2 W/cm(2) for Pr = 0.71.