Thermal Management Solutions for Electronic Devices

With industries verging on Industry 4.0 and adopting high-performance electronic and computing-intensive devices, engineers and researchers now encounter distinct challenges. The prevalence of applications in artificial intelligence, big data analysis, augmented and virtual reality, and other related cyber-physical systems, rely on the ever-growing amount of computation ability, which triggers tremendous challenges in terms of heat transfer and thermal management. In the past few decades, heat fluxes close to 1000 W/cm2 have been reported. Thus, conventional heat transfer techniques are perhaps unsuitable for coping with current thermal management needs. Although air cooling strategies are in place, they are near their intrinsic limitations.

Therefore, the development of novel advanced heat transfer solutions is of utmost urgency. In recent years, researchers have turned to micro-scales to identify solutions. The extant literature and results have shown significant heat transfer enhancement over the macro scale. However, a substantial limitation occurs as the non-linear flow resistance, in addition to the high-power consumption, created concerns regarding environmental and sustainability issues.

To overcome these challenges, it is imperative to gain further knowledge related to morphological optimizations in heat transfer performance, flow resistance reduction, surface modification methods, multi-phase physics applications and active control for upgraded performance prompting. Consequently, this Special Collection focuses on recent advances in enhancing heat transfer and thermal management via various applications and perspectives.