This article reports on the International Nanofluid Property Benchmark Exercise, or INPBE, in which the thermal conductivity of identical samples of colloidally stable dispersions of nanoparticles or "nanofluids," was measured by over 30 organizations worldwide, using a variety of experimental approaches, including the transient hot wire method, steady-state methods, and optical methods. The nanofluids tested in the exercise were comprised of aqueous and nonaqueous basefluids, metal and metal oxide particles, near-spherical and elongated particles, at low and high particle concentrations. The data analysis reveals that the data from most organizations lie within a relatively narrow band ͑Ϯ10% or less͒ about the sample average with only few outliers. The thermal conductivity of the nanofluids was found to increase with particle concentration and aspect ratio, as expected from classical theory. There are ͑small͒ systematic differences in the absolute values of the nanofluid thermal conductivity among the various experimental approaches; however, such differences tend to disappear when the data are normalized to the measured thermal conductivity of the basefluid. The effective medium theory developed for dispersed particles by Maxwell in 1881 and recently generalized by Nan et al. ͓J. Appl. Phys. 81, 6692 ͑1997͔͒, was found to be in good agreement with the experimental data, suggesting that no anomalous enhancement of thermal conductivity was achieved in the nanofluids tested in this exercise.

Nanofluids (colloidal suspensions of nanoparticles) have been reported to display significantly enhanced thermal conductivities relative to those of conventional heat transfer fluids, also at low concentrations well below 1% per volume (Putnam, S. A., et at. J. Appl. Phys. 2006, 99, 084308; Liu, M.-S. L., et al. Int. J. Heat Mass Transfer. 2006, 49; Patel, H. E., et al. Appl. Phys. Lett. 2003, 83, 2931-2933). The purpose of this paper is to evaluate the effect of the particle size, concentration, stabilization method and particle clustering on the thermal conductivity of gold nanofluids. We synthesized spherical gold nanoparticles of different size (from 2 to 45 nm) and prepared stable gold colloids in the range of volume fraction of 0.00025-1%. The colloids were inspected by UV-visible spectroscopy, transmission electron microscope (TEM) and dynamic light scattering (DLS). The thermal conductivity has been measured by the transient hot-wire method (THW) and the steady state parallel plate method (GAP method). Despite a significant search in parameter space no significant anomalous enhancement of thermal conductivity was observed. The highest enhancement in thermal conductivity is 1.4% for 40 nm sized gold particles stabilized by EGMUDE (triethyleneglycolmono-11-mercaptoundecylether) and suspended in water with a particle-concentration of 0.11 vol%.

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We address integration density in future computers based on packaging and architectural concepts of the human brain: a dense 3-D architecture for interconnects, fluid cooling, and power delivery of energetic chemical compounds transported in the same fluid with little power needed for pumping. Several efforts have demonstrated that by vertical integration, memory proximity and bandwidth are improved using efficient communication with low-complexity 2-D arrays. However, power delivery and cooling do not allow integration of multiple layers with dense logic elements. Interlayer cooled 3-D chip stacks solve the cooling bottlenecks, thereby allowing stacking of several such stacks, but are still limited by power delivery and communication. Electrochemical power delivery eliminates the electrical power supply network, freeing valuable space for communication, and allows scaling of chip stacks to larger systems beyond exascale device count and performance. We find that historical efficiency trends are related to density and that current transistors are small enough for zetascale systems once communication and supply networks are simultaneously optimized. We infer that biological efficiencies for information processing can be reached by 2060 with ultracompact space-filled systems that make use of brain-inspired packaging and allometric scaling laws.

We report an experimental investigation of a novel, high performance ultrathin manifold microchannel heat sink. The heat sink consists of impinging liquid slot-jets on a structured surface fed with liquid coolant by an overlying two-dimensional manifold. We developed a fabrication and packaging procedure to manufacture prototypes by means of standard microprocessing. A closed fluid loop for precise hydrodynamic and thermal characterization of six different test vehicles was built. We studied the influence of the number of manifold systems, the width of the heat transfer microchannels, the volumetric flow rate, and the pumping power on the hydrodynamic and thermal performance of the heat sink. A design with 12.5 manifold systems and 25 μm wide microchannels as the heat transfer structure provided the optimum choice of design parameters. For a volumetric flow rate of 1.3 l/min we demonstrated a total thermal resistance between the maximum heater temperature and fluid inlet temperature of 0.09 cm2 K/W with a pressure drop of 0.22 bar on a 2×2 cm2 chip. This allows for cooling power densities of more than 700 W/cm2 for a maximum temperature difference between the chip and the fluid inlet of 65 K. The total height of the heat sink did not exceed 2 mm, and includes a 500 μm thick thermal test chip structured by 300 μm deep microchannels for heat transfer. Furthermore, we discuss the influence of elevated fluid inlet temperatures, allowing possible reuse of the thermal energy, and demonstrate an enhancement of the heat sink cooling efficiency of more than 40% for a temperature rise of 50 K.

Nanofluids have been proposed to improve the performance of microchannel heat sinks. In this paper, we present a systematic characterization of aqueous silica nanoparticle suspensions with concentrations up to 31 vol %. We determined the particle morphology by transmission electron microscope imaging and its dispersion status by dynamic light scattering measurements. The thermophysical properties of the fluids, namely, their specific heat, density, thermal conductivity, and dynamic viscosity were experimentally measured. We fabricated microchannel heat sinks with three different channel widths and characterized their thermal performance as a function of volumetric flow rate for silica nanofluids at concentrations by volume of 0%, 5%, 16%, and 31%. The Nusselt number was extracted from the experimental results and compared with the theoretical predictions considering the change of fluids bulk properties. We demonstrated a deviation of less than 10% between the experiments and the predictions. Hence, standard correlations can be used to estimate the convective heat transfer of nanofluids. In addition, we applied a one-dimensional model of the heat sink, validated by the experiments. We predicted the potential of nanofluids to increase the performance of microchannel heat sinks. To this end, we varied the individual thermophysical properties of the coolant and studied their impact on the heat sink performance. We demonstrated that the relative thermal conductivity enhancement must be larger than the relative viscosity increase in order to gain a sizeable performance benefit. Furthermore, we showed that it would be preferable to increase the volumetric heat capacity of the fluid instead of increasing its thermal conductivity.

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