Review article: Microscale evaporative cooling technologies for high heat flux microelectronics devices: Background and recent advances

Abstract Evaporation of liquid is important in a diverse range of engineering applications, such as ink-jet printing, pesticide spraying, micro- and nanofabrication, thin-film coatings, biochemical assays, deposition of DNA/RNA microarrays, the manufacture of novel optical and electronic materials, and cooling microelectronics and power electronic devices. In particular, evaporation at the microscale has attracted increasing interest as an effective cooling strategy for overcoming the thermal challenges in high heat flux microelectronics devices. A large number of studies have demonstrated the prospect of evaporative heat transfer methods to tackle die-level hotspots reaching 1 kW/cm 2 on each high-power tier in a 3D microelectronics device. Furthermore, evaporation at the microscale (thin-film evaporation) can achieve higher heat removal than evaporation at macroscale. However, evaporation is a complicated process involving several physical transport phenomena, and their dominance can vary with variations in device dimensions and other system parameters. This article reviews the literature on the factors affecting microscale evaporation, which include the properties and temperature of the solid substrate, vapor transport in the gas domain, microconvection, and engineered surface features. Techniques to enhance evaporative heat transfer are highlighted. Extending the contact line region effectively enhances evaporative heat transfer, and this technique is employed in surface coatings or micro- and nanostructures, wicking structures, and micro- and nanoporous membranes. The evaporation rate can also be enhanced by manipulating the meniscus shape to provide an energy barrier at sharp edges of micro- and nanostructures. This review also summarizes the theoretical models for estimating evaporation rates, then discusses the physical transport processes associated with evaporation and their corresponding thermal resistances. Because non-invasive, high resolution temperature measurement and visualization are critical for implementing evaporative cooling in high heat flux applications, state-of-art techniques are also discussed. Laser-induced fluorescence techniques are judged the most advanced for temperature measurement, and particle image velocimetry (PIV) is the most advanced means of flow field visualization. This review identifies the most promising evaporative cooling techniques for next generation of ultra-high heat flux microelectronics applications. It also compares the performance of these cooling technologies in a regime plot, providing useful information for designing effective cooling solutions. We end by summarizing the current challenges and discussing the outlook for evaporative cooling technologies, then consider future research needs.