Comparison of synthetic and steady air jets for impingement heat transfer over vertical surfaces

Natural convection air cooling is the method of choice for many low-power electronics applications due to cost, availability, and reliability considerations. This method is not only limited to low-power applications, but is also constrained by the buoyancy dependence of the flow. Therefore, further enhancement of natural convection is needed. Enhanced natural convection allows higher heat dissipation while maintaining the simplicity of passive cooling. Synthetic jet devices operating on the microfluidics principle provide unique cooling advantages for local cooling with high coefficients of performance. Synthetic jets used in the current study are piezoelectrically driven, small-scale, pulsating devices capable of producing highly turbulent jets formed by periodic entrainment and expulsion of the fluid through an orifice. The compactness of the jet actuator coupled with the high exit air velocities can significantly reduce the size of thermal management systems. In this paper, we present experimental results for impingement heat transfer for both steady and unsteady jets over a Reynolds number range of 100 to 3,000. A range of nozzle-to-plate surface distances is discussed. To mimic a comparable electronics component, we used a 25.4-mm square heated surface.