FIELD OF THE INVENTION

The present invention relates generally to heat exchange. More particularly the present invention relates to a complex flow manifold for use with a heat exchanger to form a multi-functional thermal management unit.

BACKGROUND OF THE INVENTION

Although common heat exchangers, such as tube, shell, or fin structures, or metallic foams have proven to transfer heat effectively, limitations include precise control of flow patterns, temperature distributions, pressure drops, etc. In addition, scaling up the manufacturing and modeling of these units from the micro-scale to the macro-scale can be time consuming and expensive.

Traditional heat exchangers employ axial flow and have inherent temperature gradients. Using distributed, multi-directional flow requires multiple cells within the thermal management unit. Creating local cells requires inlet and outlet flow channels (localized plumbing and connections) that can be challenging and costly to manufacture.

For traditional heat exchangers and common heat exchange applications, quantities such as heat transfer coefficient, pumping power, average temperature, etc. are global or macro-scale properties, measured across the whole device being cooled. However, in some applications, such as laser diodes, temperature uniformity is also a concern and temperature distributions must be controlled at the local or micro-scale level and this can be challenging.

Designing and modeling a heat exchange unit at the small or micro-scale is common, but scaling up the local or micro-scale design to cover large areas can be challenging. Difficulties may include manufacture constraints associated with expanding the geometry of the design and computational costs associated with modeling the performance of a large-scale structure. Further still, discrepancies may appear in modeling when the sizes are expanded, causing inaccuracies in the prediction of bulk properties.

It would therefore be advantageous to provide a complex flow manifold that when combined with a heat exchanger provides many local, thermal management cells that are designed to optimize multiple properties simultaneously and allow for scale-up of the many thermal management cells into a thermal management unit of indefinite size but identical properties.

