Cooling Performance Evaluation of Synthetic Jet Based Thermal Solution Module

Abstract

The convective thermal resistance which represents the heat removal from the heat sink surface of a heat pipe/heat sink module to mean coolant flow temperature is often a dominant contributor to the overall thermal resistance of a heat pipe/heat sink module or remote heat exchange (RHE). RHE is a thermal solution module composed of a heat spreader, thin flattened heat pipe with low profile heat sink which is widely used for the thermal management of compact portable electronic devices. Minimizing the convective thermal resistance at the heat sink of RHE as well as thickness reduction is often an important objective for the thermal designers. Recently, an alternate air mover system which operates based on piezoelectricity is developed. This device is called dual cooling jet (DCJ) in short which can be fabricated with very small thickness down to 1.0 mm. Thin DCJ as a synthetic jet generates air jet with more than 7 m/s air flow velocity which is promising for the increasing demands of thinner next generation portable electronic devices. DCJ is a promising device to dissipate the heat from the heat sink of a RHE. In this work, the performance of RHE is evaluated when heat is dissipated from its heat sink by DCJ. The results are compared with conventional rotary fan. The results show that more than 12 W of heat can be dissipated by DCJ which can easily compete with some commercialized rotary mini blowers while having much smaller thickness. Various configuration of heat sink–DCJ combinations as well as size and shape of both heat sink and DCJ are tested and based on thermal resistance data, cooling effectiveness of DCJ is studied.