A Novel Microelectronics Cooling Technique Using a Pair of Unsteady Confined Impinging Air Jets

The unsteady laminar flow and heat transfer characteristics for a pair of confined impinging air jets centered in a channel were studied numerically. The time-averaged heat transfer coefficient for a pair of heat sources centered in the channel and aligned with the jets was determined as well as the oscillating jet frequency for the unsteady cases. The present study continues the authors’ previous investigation, which emphasized how single confined jets will remain steady at Reynolds numbers that make side-by-side jets highly unsteady. The nature of this unsteadiness depends on the proximity of the jet inlets, the channel dimensions and the jet Reynolds number. The jet unsteadiness causes the stagnation point locations to sweep back and forth over the impingement region, and the jets “wash” a larger surface area on the target wall. The results indicate that the dual jets become unsteady between a Reynolds number of 200 and 300. Also, in the range of Reynolds numbers studied, a fixed stagnation “bubble” was formed on the target wall between the two jets, which reduced the heat transfer removal from that region, leading in fact to a quasi-independence of the local heat transfer on flow conditions. The stagnant region contains slow moving warm air that forces the cool impinging air jets to flow to the sides of this target wall area. The oscillating frequency of the flow increases with Reynolds number for the unsteady cases. Also, the time-averaged heat transfer coefficient on the heat sources rises as the Reynolds number increases for the steady cases but there is a slight decrease when it transitions to unsteady flow, indicating again that the stagnation “bubble” occurring between the two heat sources affects the local heat transfer.