micro-cool

Microchannel cooling

Microfluidic devices are also being studied for the development of novel cooling systems for HEP detectors and front-end electronics.

This technique has been selected as the baseline cooling of the NA62 GigaTracKer (GTK) silicon pixel detectors and their read-out electronics where a thin silicon cooling plate will stand directly in a particle beam. For this first application, C₆F₁₄ single phase liquid cooling has been selected. This dielectric fluid, already in use in several detectors at the CERN Large Hadron Collider (LHC), exhibits a good radiation resistance as well as thermal and chemical stability. The configuration under study consists of 100 µm thick silicon wafers in which 200 x 70 µm micro-channels are etched by deep reactive ion etching. They are closed by bonding of a 30 µm thick silicon wafer. This meets both the very aggressive material budget specification (maximum allowed thickness of 150 µm) and the removal of the anticipated 4 W/cm² power dissipation with a temperature variation smaller than 5˚C over the 60 x 40 mm surface.