Ultrathin synthetic jets for thermal management of consumer electronics

With a rapid increase in mobile technologies such as tablets, ultrabooks and smartphones over the last few years, cooling needs in consumer electronics have grown significantly. The use of natural convection with heat spreading to the skin of the mobile device is quite common in such systems. However, with increasing functionality, more heat dissipation is required from these devices and quite often natural convection from the surface is not sufficient. This paper addresses this specific cooling challenge, and describes the development of sub 3mm ultrathin synthetic jets (UTSJ). These small scale synthetic jets produce highly turbulent sheets of air from nozzles less than 1mm wide that can be targeted at hotspots as well as create flow through very small factor heat sinks. Another feature of these jets is that the device can be sandwiched between two walls and still create a flow, unlike fans that require plenums above and below the device. This enables thinner platform implementations than with conventional fans. Flow and thermal data are presented to compare the performance of the UTSJ to natural convection as well as parameters that impact the performance of the jets.