Fundamental Behaviors and Limits of Impingement Cooling

Direct fluid impingement on a surface has been shown to generate very high performance heat transfer. Several systems have been designed and commercialized incorporating impingement cooling, such as single and multiple jets, sprays and combined jet-drain arrays. This work proposes a theory for the heat transfer behavior of jet impingement with a local drain (i.e., a jet-drain array) that shows good agreement with published data from commercial products. A prototype jet-drain array was fabricated and tested, and the theory predicts its performance extremely well. This theory can be used to design new, high performance heat transfer systems as well as to compare jet array performance with other technologies, such as spray impingement.