Steady and Unsteady Air Impingement Heat Transfer for Electronics Cooling Applications

This paper focuses on two forced convection methods-steady jet flow and pulsating flow by synthetic jets-that can be used in applications requiring significant amounts of heat removal from electronics components. Given the dearth of available data, we have experimentally investigated steady jets and piezoelectrically driven synthetic jets that provide pulsating flow of air at a high coefficient of performance. To mimic a typical electronics component, a 25.4-mm x 25.4-mm vertical heated surface was used for heat removal. The impingement heat transfer, in the form of Nusselt number, is reported for both steady and unsteady jets over Reynolds numbers from 100 to 3000. The effect of jet-to-plate surface distance on the impingement heat transfer is also investigated. Our results show that synthetic jets can provide significantly higher cooling than steady jets in the Reynolds number range of 100 to 3000. We attribute the superior performance of synthetic jets to vortex shedding associated with the unsteady flow.