There is increased interest fr om the state and business in the microelectronics market. This encourages scientists to conduct thematic R&D that will offer the market innovations with scientific and technological solutions that make production processes and their operations more efficient. Ivan Vozhakov and Fedor Ronshin, scientists at the NSU Department of Physics, and MA student Andrey Lukyanov, conducted a numerical and experimental study of Taylor bubbles in a square minichannel. This research will not only improve the cooling systems of three-dimensional computing chips, but affect the intensification of mass transfer, which has chemical, biological, and medical applications.
Ronshin explained,
In three-dimensional chips volumetric heat is released, unlike conventional chips wh ere heat is removed from the surface. One of the promising methods for their cooling is the use of mini- and microchannels that are created in the chip itself by etching during the manufacturing process. To characterize heat transfer, it is necessary to determine the thickness of the liquid film in a two-phase flow. Classical correlations determine the thickness of liquid films only in round channels, but in production it is easier to create channels with a square section. In our study, we proposed a correlation for the film thickness in a square channel that allows us to calculate the cooling efficiency of the system.
The physicists studied the distribution of velocities in liquid and gas, the distribution of the thickness of liquid film in the bubble, the streamlines in the liquid near the bubble and in the bubble itself. The calculated data of the model built by the liquid volume method in the OpenFOAM open source package coincided with the results of an experimental study conducted using the high-speed shadow method and automatic processing. At the same time, some features of mass transfer in a square channel were also revealed.
Lukyanov described their results,
In the square channel in front of the bubble, there are four stable vortices in the direction of the corners of the channel and inside the bubble there is a specific flow from the tail to the nose of the bubble. In the bubble, the gas swirls in a transverse direction. These factors have an additional effect on the intensification of mass transfer. From a practical point of view, this can be used not only for cooling processes, but also for such tasks in chemistry, biology, and medicine as extraction or mixing of substances with high efficiency.
The study was supported by the Russian Science Foundation grant No. 21-79-10357. The results were published in the prestigious international journal Physics of Fluids (Q1).
