Experimental Heat Transfer Enhancement in Single-phase Liquid Microchannel Cooling with Cross-flow Synthetic Jet

The present study experimentally investigated a new hybrid cooling scheme by combination of a microchannel heat sink with a micro-synthetic jet actuator. The heat sink consisted of a single rectangular microchannel measured 550 μm wide, 500 μm deep and 26 mm long. The synthetic jet actuator with a 100 μm diameter orifice was placed right above the microchannel and 5 mm downstream from the channel inlet. Micro jet is synthesized from the fluid flowing through the microchannel. Periodic disturbance is generated when the synthetic jet interacts with the microchannel flow. Heat transfer performance is enhanced as local turbulence is generated and propagated downstream the microchannel. The scale and frequency of the disturbance can be controlled by changing the driving voltage and frequency of the piezoelectric driven synthetic jet actuator. The effects of synthetic jet on microchannel heat transfer performance were studied based on the microchannel flow Reynolds number, the jet operating voltage and frequency, respectively. It shows that the synthetic jet has a greater heat transfer enhancement for microchannel flow at lower Reynolds number. It also shows that the thermal effects of the synthetic jet are functions of the jet driving voltage and frequency. We obtained around 42% heat transfer enhancement for some test cases, whereas the pressure drop across the microchannel increases very slightly. The paper concludes that the synthetic jet can effectively enhance single-phase liquid microchannel heat transfer performance and would have more promising enhancements if multi-jets are applied along the microchannel.