Two-Phase Flow and Thermal Management Laboratory (TPFTML)

Challenges:

A quest for smaller and light-weight architectures in electronic devices and power system has been increased for a past few decades, and heat removal and thermal management have been receiving substantial attention due to harsh design requirement and extreme operating conditions. 3D-packaging that requires high density integration of IC chips represents the technology that requires intense and efficient cooling, and a variety of thermal management technologies have been developed to deal with heat fluxes higher than 10² to 10³ W/cm².

Approaches:

The single-phase cooling has been widely used, but its heat dissipation capability has been compromised by relying only on fluid’s sensible heat. Two-phase cooling in macro-/micro-channel was proposed as alternative technology, and its heat dissipating ability even for ultra-high heat flux has been proved by numerous experiments.

Research interests:

TPFTML's research area largely can be categorized into design/practical issues and analysis/fundamentals of thermal system, and especially physical analysis and application of two-phase flow are main research topics. The primary and long-term goal is applying classical theory of two-phase flow to a variety of new technologies as many as possible. Specific topics includes two-phase flow and heat transfer, thermal system design and analysis, and thermal system analysis utilizing commercial CFD packages.