Heat transfer characteristics of synthetic jet impingement cooling

Synthetic jet is a novel flow technique which synthesizes stagnant air to form a jet, and is potentially useful for cooling applications. The impingement heat transfer characteristics of a synthetic jet are studied in this work. Toward that end, the behavior of the average heat transfer coefficient of the impinged heated surface with variation in the axial distance between the jet and the heated surface is measured. In addition, radial distribution of mean and rms velocity and static pressure are also measured. The experiments are conducted for a wide range of input parameters: the Reynolds number (Re) is in the range of 1500–4200, the ratio of the axial distance between the heated surface and the jet to the jet orifice diameter is in the range of 0–25, and the length of the orifice plate to the orifice diameter varies between 8 and 22 in this study. The maximum heat transfer coefficient with the synthetic jet is found to be upto 11 times more than the heat transfer coefficient for natural convection. The behavior of average Nusselt number is found to be similar to that obtained for a continuous jet. The exponent of maximum Nusselt number with Re varies between 0.6 and 1.4 in the present experiments, depending on the size of the enclosure. A direct comparison with a continuous jet is also made and their performances are found to be comparable under similar set of conditions. Such detailed heat transfer results with a synthetic jet have not been reported earlier and are expected to be useful for cooling of electronics and other devices.