Development of Synthetic Jet Arrays for Heat Transfer Enhancement in Air-Cooled Heat Sinks for Electronics Cooling

Synthetic jet arrays driven by a piston-diaphragm structure with a translational motion were fabricated. A piezo-bow actuator generating large translational displacements at a high working frequency was used to drive the jets. Vibration analysis with a laser vibrometer shows the peak-to-peak displacement of the piston inside the jet cavity of about 0.5 mm at the second resonant vibrational frequency of 1,240 Hz. In this driving condition, the peak velocity of a 20-orifice jet array reaches 45 m/s for each orifice with a total power consumption of 1.6 W. Heat transfer performance of the jet array was tested on a 100-mm-long single channel of a 26-channel heat sink. The synthetic jet flow impinges on the tips of the fins. A cross flow through the channel enters from the two ends of the channel, and exits from the middle. Results show that the activation of jets generates a unit-average heat transfer enhancement of 9.3% when operating with a channel flow velocity of 14.7 m/s, and 23.1% when operating with a channel flow velocity of 8 m/s. The effects of various choices for orifice configuration and different dimensionless distances from the fin tips, z/d, on jet performance were evaluated. By decreasing the length of the fin channel from 100 mm to 89 mm and reducing the orifice number of the jet array from 20 to 18, jet peak velocities of about 54 m/s can be obtained with the same power consumption, and a heat transfer enhancement of 31.0% from the jets can be achieved on the 89-mm-long heat sink channel with a flow velocity of 8 m/s.