A comprehensive analysis of flow and heat transfer performance in a novel Tesla valve microchannel

High integration of high-performance chips has led to considerable heat generation, making efficient and stable heat dissipation within the chips extremely important. In this paper, a novel microchannel structure based on the Tesla valve is proposed to dissipate the heat generated by the high heat flux density in the chips. The numerical simulations are then performed using the standard k-ε turbulence model to explore how the number of valve stages, valve core shapes, structural parameters, and arrangements affect the flow and heat transfer performance of the microchannel. The results show that the microchannel with 12 valve stages exhibits the best performance. Compared to the rectangular fin (RF) type microchannel, the heat transfer performance in Tesla valve microchannels can be significantly enhanced, where the increased performance evaluation criterion ( PEC ) for reverse flow is superior to that for forward flow. The optimal shape of the Tesla valve core is an ellipse, whose PEC can be increased by up to 20.23% compared with the RF microchannel. More importantly, the increasing arrangement of the valve structure along the flow direction can optimally balance flow resistance and heat transfer, resulting in enhanced overall performance. These results can provide new insights into efficient heat dissipation in electronic devices.