Microchannel heat sink fabrication with roughened bottom walls

Abstract

Simple bulk wet anisotropic etching procedures that create roughened microstructures along the bottom walls of microchannel heat sinks are presented. The roughened bottom wall is intended to promote flow disturbance and heat transfer enhancement. The basic principle of this study is to utilize the crystal orientation characteristics of [110] silicon wafers during etching. We first fabricated the microchannel with vertical sidewalls and a bottom wall with a direction of [110]. An experiment is carried out to show that hexagon-like cavities can be produced on the {110} plane using a mask containing parallelograms. The hexagon-like cavity is produced in the microchannel bottom wall also in [110] direction. In this way, microchannel heat sinks with roughened bottom walls can be produced.