Experiments and Simulation of an Impinging Synthetic Jet Designed to Eliminate Actuator Artifacts

Synthetic jets are created by periodically ejecting and injecting fluid from an orifice or channel. Despite delivering no net mass flow per cycle, a synthetic jet delivers flow with net positive momentum. Small, compact synthetic jet actuators can be fabricated to operate in the subaudible acoustic range and can be packaged in orientations that allow them to deliver cooling air flow to electronic devices. The most promising orientation is one that delivers the jet flow in a direction normal to the heated surface such that it impinges on the surface as a periodic jet. In previous studies, numerical simulations have been performed by the authors, utilizing a canonical geometry, with the purpose of eliminating actuator artifacts from the fundamental physics that drive the problem. The present paper reports on laboratory experiments that have been performed in order to nearly replicate the idealized synthetic jet geometry and thus allow comparison to the previous numerical investigations. The periodic volume change in an upstream plenum required to produce the synthetic jet is accomplished with an acoustic speaker operated at low frequencies. The amplitude and the frequency at which the jet is actuated determine the Reynolds and Strouhal numbers, which are the dominant non-dimensional groups that control the behavior of the impinging synthetic jet. By maintaining the Re and the St in the laboratory experiments to match those of the small scale actuators, the laboratory experiments have been geometrically scaled up to allow highly resolved measurements of the unsteady velocity field and the local time-dependent Nusselt number on the target heated surface. Experiments were performed at variable jet Re, frequencies, and height from the target surface. The dependence of the surface averaged Nu to jet parameters generally agrees with the computational results. However, discrepancies found between numerical and empirical local data are under revision.