Predicting heat transfer from unsteady synthetic jets

Abstract

Synthetic jets are piezo-driven, small-scale, pulsating devices capable of producing highly turbulent jets formed by periodic entrainment and expulsion of the fluid in which they are embedded. The compactness of these devices accompanied by high air velocities provides an exciting opportunity to significantly reduce the size of thermal management systems in electronic packages. A number of researchers have shown the implementations of synthetic jets on heat transfer applications; however, there exists no correlation to analytically predict the heat transfer coefficient for such applications. A closed form correlation was developed to predict the heat transfer coefficient as a function of jet geometry, position, and operating conditions for impinging flow based on experimental data. The proposed correlation was shown to predict the synthetic jet impingement heat transfer within 25% accuracy for a wide range of operating conditions and geometrical variables.