Experimental investigation of spray-sublimation cooling system with CO₂ dry-ice particles

Thermal management system (TMS) is becoming a major factor to restrict the development of electronic devices, thus an advanced cooling approach is urgently needed for satisfying the increasing requirement on heat dissipation capacity. In the current study, a carbon dioxide (CO₂) dry ice spray cooling system is presented to explore the heat dissipation capacity using the sublimation as the two-phase-change cooling process integrated with the designed multi-orifice spray nozzle (MOSN). The dry ice particles can be converted from liquid CO₂ through a sudden adiabatic expansion process by the Joule-Thomson effect. Heat transfer experiments were organized to investigate the effects of nozzle orifice diameters (NOD) and spray mass flow rate (SMFR) since there is a lack of study on the dry ice spray cooling performance. The relatively optimal NOD of 1.2 mm was obtained under a certain SMFR of 6.2 g/s and a fixed spray height of 7 mm according to the cooling performance. The highest heat flux performed was 221.1 W/cm² with a best surface temperature of only 64.1 °C which justifies its future application of TMS.