Inaudible cooling: A novel approach to thermal management for power electronics based on acoustic streaming

A new approach for forced convection cooling based on “Reynolds streaming” is presented, which allows for additional heat dissipation in situations where conventional active cooling devices (e.g. fans) are not suitable. The system operates inaudible, has no moving parts and is therefore durable and immune to dust. Its operation is dependent on numerous influences that have been identified and analyzed through experiment and simulation. It employs a new kind of acoustic driver delivering high intensity fields within air, while maintaining a small build volume. This transducer was designed and optimized using FEM-Simulation and verified with real-world prototypes at each major simulation milestone. All of the taken measures improved the performance by a factor of nearly 2 while reducing the system size by a factor of over 6 at the same time when compared to the first working system. This last generation device delivers comparable cooling performance.