Enhancing heat dissipation for high-flux electronics: Multi-objective optimization of nanofluid flow in staggered microchannels

Aiming at the heat dissipation requirements of high-power electronic devices, this paper systematically investigates the heat transfer enhancement mechanism and multi-objective optimization method of copper-water nanofluids in microchannel heat sinks (MCHS) with staggered triangular spoiler fins. Although triangular spoiler fins and nanofluids have been individually studied, their integrated optimization considering nonlinear parameter interactions remains underexplored. In this study, a staggered arrangement of triangular spoiler fins is designed, and computational fluid dynamics (CFD) simulations are performed to analyze the effects of fin height, nanofluid velocity, temperature, and volume fraction on heat sink performance. For example, when the fin height increases from 0 mm to 0.6 mm, the maximum temperature of the microchannel decreases by 6.74%, but the pressure drop increases by a factor of 5.3. The main contribution lies in the integration of the response surface method (RSM) with the non-dominated sorting genetic algorithm (NSGA-II) to perform a synergistic multi-objective optimization, quantifying the inherent trade-offs between heat transfer enhancement and pressure drop. A set of optimal parameters are obtained to achieve balanced thermal and hydraulic performance.