Meso Scale Pulsating Jets for Electronics Cooling

Microfluid devices are conventionally used for boundary layer control in many aerospace applications. Synthetic jets are intense small-scale turbulent jets formed from periodic entrainment and expulsion of the fluid in which they are embedded. The jets can be made to impinge upon electronic components thereby providing forced convection impingement cooling. The small size of these devices accompanied by the high exit air velocity provides an exciting opportunity to significantly reduce the size of thermal management hardware in electronics. A proprietary meso scale synthetic jet designed at GE Global Research is able to provide a maximum air velocity of $90m∕s$ from a 0.85 mm hydraulic diameter rectangular orifice. An experimental study for determining the cooling performance of synthetic jets was carried out by using a single jet to cool a thin foil heater. The heat transfer augmentation caused by the jets depends on several parameters, such as, driving frequency, driving voltage, jet axial distance, heater size, and heat flux. During the experiments, the operating frequency for the jets was varied between 3.4 and 5.4 kHz, while the driving voltage was varied between 50 and $90VRMS$⁠. Two different heater powers, corresponding to approximately 50 and 80 °C, were tested. A square heater with a surface area of $156mm2$ was used to mimic the hot component and detailed temperature measurements were obtained with a microscopic infrared thermal imaging technique. A maximum heat transfer enhancement of approximately 10 times over natural convection was measured. The maximum measured coefficient of performance was approximately 3.25 due to the low power consumption of the synthetic jets.