Evaluation of cooling performance of a piezoelectric micro blower in narrow flow passage

This paper describes a cooling performance of a novel miniature piezoelectric micro blower. We especially focus on an investigation whether the piezoelectric micro blower is available for a novel cooling method of high-density packaging electronic equipment or not. In order to investigate the effectiveness of the piezoelectric micro blower, an understanding of the blower performance (P - Q curve) becomes important. Especially, the effects of narrow flow passages and components around the blower on the P - Q curve should be investigated in order to apply the blower to high-density packaging electronic equipment. In addition, because of the miniature structure of the piezoelectric micro blower, a supply flow rate of the blower becomes relatively small. Therefore, an estimation of a net cooling performance of the piezoelectric micro blower should be investigated. In this paper, we evaluated a cooling performance of the piezoelectric micro blower. We firstly evaluated the P - Q curve of the piezoelectric micro blower. Especially the effects of the electrical components mounted near the blower on the P - Q curve. It is found that the performance characteristic of the proposed blower is almost not changed regardless of the existence of the components near the blower. In addition, we secondly investigated the cooling performance of the proposed blower in a narrow flow passage with finned heat sinks experimentally. Through the investigations, we evaluated the effectiveness of the piezoelectric micro blower as the cooling method of high-density packaging electronic equipment.