Investigation of a piezoelectric fan cooling system with multiple magnetic fans

Previous research has shown that the performance of a single piezoelectric (PZT) fan cooling system that is strongly affected by the operating frequency, fan amplitude, fan arrangement, and power consumption. Moreover, new dimensionless numbers, including M-p and R-i, have been defined to analyze the performance of the cooling system. In this study, an innovative multiple vibrating-fan cooling system has been developed by using PZT force and magnetic force. In this design, a PZT plate can be used to actuate five vibrating fans simultaneously. The performance of the system is demonstrated by the total amplitude of the system. The total amplitude of the single PZT fan system was 8mm while the total amplitude of the multiple vibrating-fan system was 31 mm under the same power consumption. Furthermore, the multiple vibrating-fan system can be embedded into a heat sink directly. The temperature of the heat sink dropped from 67 degrees C to 50 degrees C when the system was operated under the condition of 36.4 Hz, 50 V, and lambda = 2 mm. The result shows that the temperature drop reaches 17 degrees C under a power consumption of 0.03W. (C) 2012 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.