PAMS Seminar: "Bioinspired Evaporative Cooling for High Heat Flux Applications" by Dr. Damena Agonafer

Dr. Damena Agonafer
Department of Mechanical Engineering & Materials Science
Washington University in St. Louis

Abstract:
The demand for data centers and corresponding power requirements continues to rise pushing 2% of the annual electricity use in the US. The need for internet access for a variety of requirements including for online education has not been more pronounced than during the COVID-19 pandemic the world is facing now. The failure of voltage scaling with transistor gate scaling since the mid-2000s has resulted in the failure of Dennardian scaling resulting in increased power density with new technology nodes. To limit the chip power, with every new generation of transistors, an increasing part of the silicon remains inactive or dark limiting the performance of the processors. In addition, the recent emphasis on applications such as artificial intelligence and data mining is pushing the power limits of GPUs and CPUs used on data center servers. The next generation of high-powered micro- and power electronic devices will require advanced thermal management solutions for dissipating large heat fluxes that will soon exceed 1 kW/cm2. The performance of state-of-art cooling technologies are lagging the maximum heat dissipation requirements due to either inherent limits of physics or technical constraints (e.g., high operating pressures). Such high heat dissipation requires aggressive cooling strategies for ensuring reliable performance of these electronic components. Two-phase cooling technologies, such as microscale evaporation, are of growing interest for electronics cooling due to their high heat removal capacity. In this talk, I will identify the key mechanisms of microscale evaporation and address how geometrical features from microstructures and surface nanocoatings affect contact line dynamics, thermocapillary flow, and interfacial transport during the different stages of the evaporation process.

This seminar will be held exclusively on Zoom (955 5209 1021). Please visit the Physics Seminars page for a link.

Free