Heat transfer enhancement by synthetic jet arrays in air-cooled heat sinks for use in electronics cooling

A synthetic jet is an intermittent jet which issues through an orifice from a closed cavity over half of an oscillation cycle. Over the other half, the flow is drawn back through the same orifice into the cavity as a sink flow. The flow is driven by an oscillating diaphragm, which is one wall of the cavity. Synthetic jets are widely used for heat transfer enhancement since they are effective in disturbing and thinning thermal boundary layers on surfaces being cooled. They do so by creating an intermittently-impinging flow and by carrying to the hot surface turbulence generated by breakdown of the shear layer at the jet edge. The present study documents experimentally and computationally heat transfer performance of an array of synthetic jets used in a heat sink designed for cooling of electronics. This heat sink is comprised of a series of longitudinal fins which constitute walls of parallel channels. In the present design, the synthetic jet flow impinges on the tips of the fins. In the experiment, one channel of a 20-channel heat sink is tested. A second flow, perpendicular to the jet flow, passes through the channel, drawn by a vacuum system. Surface- and time-averaged heat transfer coefficients for the channel are measured, first with just the channel flow active then with the synthetic jets added. The purpose is to assess heat transfer enhancement realized by the synthetic jets. The multiple synthetic jets are driven by a single diaphragm which, in turn, is activated by a piezoelectrically-driven mechanism. The operating frequency of the jets is 1250 Hz with a cycle-maximum jet velocity of 50 m/s, as measured with a miniature hot-film anemometer probe. In the computational portion of the present paper, diaphragm movement is driven by a piston, simulating the experimental conditions. The flow is computed with a dynamic mesh using the commercial software package ANSYS FLUENT. Computed heat transfer coefficients show a good match with experimental values giving a maximum difference of less than 10%. The effects of amplitude and frequency of the diaphragm motion are documented. Changes in heat transfer due to interactions between the synthetic jet flow and the channel flow are documented in cases of differing channel flow velocities as well as differing jet operating conditions. Heat transfer enhancement obtained by activating the synthetic jets can be as large as 300% when the channel flow is of a low velocity compared to the synthetic jet peak velocity (as low as 4 m/s in the present study).