NUMERICAL PREDICTION OF THE THERMAL RESISTANCE OF COLD PLATE

摘要

IBM's Enterprise System/9000 water-cooled mainframes were developed in the mid to late 1980's and shipped up to the mid 1990's. The high operating speed and corresponding high chip heat fluxes in these systems were made possible by improvements in component and system level cooling. Specifically, the water-cooled cold plates used to cool the logic modules provided up to twice the cooling capability of cold plates used in previous systems. These improvements were necessary in order to adequately cool the 121 chips mounted to the TCM glass ceramic substrate, with chip powers reaching 27 watts or a heat flux of 64 watts/cm~2. The corresponding module powers were as high as 2000 watts. This paper presents a computational fluid dynamics (CFD) approach to compute the thermal performance of the cold plate. The 3D incompressible turbulent convective flow and heat conduction are solved simultaneously. The numerical calculations predict the variations of the thermal resistance with the flow rate. The numerical results agree well with the experimental data.