Converting vertical heat supply into horizontal motion for microtechnological pumping and autonomous waste heat recovery

TL;DR

This paper introduces a novel method that converts vertical waste heat into horizontal fluid motion, enabling autonomous microfluidic pumping and waste heat recovery through thermocapillary flows.

Contribution

It presents a scalable, heat-driven microfluidic pumping mechanism based on geometric symmetry breaking and heterogeneous thermal conductivities, with experimental and numerical validation.

Findings

Effective conversion of vertical heat into horizontal flow demonstrated

Good agreement between experimental and numerical flow fields

Applicable to microfluidic systems and thermal management solutions

Abstract

The rapid advancement of high-performance computing infrastructure and its extended application produce an increasing amount of waste heat. This heat constitutes an unsustainable loss of energy as well as requires cooling solutions that transcend conventional thermal management. Here, we demonstrate a novel mechanism that converts vertical waste heat supply directly into horizontal fluid motion, enabling autonomous, self-powered pumping in microenvironments. Our approach is based on a concept that combines geometric symmetry breaking with heterogeneous thermal conductivities to induce local thermocapillary Marangoni flows. We provide an implementation of the concept as well as an experimental and numerical proof-of-concept, showing good agreement between the respective flow fields. The approach is scalable and operates under realistic areal heating conditions. It enables versatile pumping designs for microtechnological applications, lab-on-a-chip architectures, passive thermal management and heat-driven microfluidic systems.