Experimental study on heat transfer performance of a novel compact spray cooling module

•A novel compact spray cooling module was designed for multi-heat source thermal management systems.•The heat flux can reach 304.7 W/cm2 similar to the liquid cold plate size.•Overall thermal control with adjustable parameters of spray cooling cold plate was studied.•Temperature disequilibrium of multi-heat source on spray cooling module was tested. With the rapid increase in power density for miniaturization and integration of electronic component, the liquid-cooled cold plate, shows difficulty in meeting the increasing heat demand of electronic chips. In this paper, a novel compact spray cooling module with high heat dissipation performance is proposed. The miniaturization of spray cooling module is realized by micro-nozzle and side spray. Based on this method, a spray cooling module with micro-nozzle was designed and processed, both the 40% v.t. ethylene glycol coolant and water were used as working fluids in this system, the size of spray cooling module is the same as the conventional cold plate. The spray characteristics of the micro-nozzle was analyzed and the heat transfer characteristics of the cold plate under multiple heat sources were studied. Experimental results showed that the droplets of micro nozzle were mainly concentrated in mainstream region and the droplet velocity was relatively high and the heat flux of spray cooling module could reach 304.7 W/cm2, and the maximum temperature difference of multi-heat source was lower than 6.5 °C, which indicated that the proposed spray cooling module could show advantage in thermal management of high-heat flux multiple heat source.