Thermal Simulation of Different Microfluidic Structures in Copper-core-embedded PCB

This paper suggests a copper-core-embedded PCB for power modules thermal management. Four kinds of heat dissipation micro-channel structures have been designed through the copper core, namely, no channel structure, whole area straight-through structure, partial straight-through structure, partial periodic array structure. The fluidic channels were realized by machining and the closed microfluidic structures were obtained by diffusion welding. To analog the power module working, a 60W simulated heat source was realized by thin film ceramic process. The functional module and copper-core-embedded PCB integrated models were structured by CATIA. Thermal-fluid coupling simulations were conducted by a synchronous CFD tools (Flo-EFD) to reveal thermal and flow characteristics of different types copper-core-embedded micro-channels. From our simulation results, the surface temperature of functional module can be reached to 600 °C when no channel structure copper-core-embedded PCB was used. Once the active microfluidic structures were introduced into PCB, the surface temperatures of functional modules showed significant reductions, sharply down to 45°C. Among the three microfluidic structures, partial periodic array structure played the best performance in cooling capability, through which the maximum surface temperatures of functional module was 38.42°C.