Effect of Corner Radii on the Thermal & Fluid Flow Performance of the Laminar Flow through Rectangular Micro Channel

Metallic micro channels have the advantage of high thermal conductivity to strength ratio. The recent advances in the manufacturing processes, has increased the feasibility of realizing metallic micro channels with close dimensional control. Presently, various types of micro manufacturing processes are available for the realization of the metallic micro channels. However it is not practical to manufacture any dimensional feature with sharp corner. Depending on the choice of the manufacturing process, the corners get rounded to varying degree. When compared with the dimensions of micro channels the magnitude of the corner radius is considerable. In this paper an attempt has been made to study numerically the effect of corner radius on the performance of the micro channels. Commercially available computational fluid dynamics software ANSYS CFX was used for the simulation of micro channels performance. The thermal & fluid flow performance of the micro channel was simulated by varying the corner radius from 50 microns to 200 microns. The coolant flow velocities were varied from 0.48m/s to 1.27m/s. The Temperature dependent material properties have been used in the analysis. The simulation results were validated using published literature.