Three-Dimensional Modelling of Heat Transfer in Micro-Channels With Synthetic Jet

An in-house computer code is developed and applied to investigate the effect of a synthetic jet on heat transfer rates in forced convection of water in silicon micro-channels etched in the rear side of the silicon substrate. To account for the deflection of the membrane located at the bottom of the actuator cavity, a moving mesh technique to solve the flow and heat transfer is purposefully adopted. The governing equations are transformed into the curvilinear coordinate system in which the grid velocities evaluated are then fed into the computation of the flow in the cavity domain thus allowing the conservation equations of mass, momentum and energy to be solved within the stationary computational domain. The fully three-dimensional model considers the SIMPLE method to link the pressure and velocity. A heat flux of 1 MW/m² is applied at the surface of the top of the silicon wafer and the resulting complex, conjugate heat transfer through the silicon substrate is included. The hydrodynamics feature of the flow is validated against existing experimental results and verified against numerical results from commercial package ANSYS CFX 11.0. Good agreement has been achieved. To track the development of the flow and heat transfer when the actuator is switched on, numerical results of 20 full cycles of the actuator are simulated. When the actuator is switched on, noticeable temperature drop is observed at all points in the substrate from those which existed when there has been a steady water flow in the channel. At the end of 20th cycle of actuation, the maximum temperature in the wafer has reduced by 5.4 K in comparison with the steady flow values. In comparison with the two-dimensional study which account for 17K reduction, it indicates that synthetic jet has only smaller beneficial cooling and has been over-estimated in the previous two-dimensional study.