Jet impingement cooling using fluidic oscillators: an experimental study

International audienceA growing portion of the thermal load on board airplanes is due to densely packed electronic systems. This increased thermal load along with constraints on weight and volume have made simple and reliable cooling solutions an urgent need in the aerospace industry. There is a wealth of cooling solutions available in order to meet these demands, the simplest and most adaptable of which is probably jet impingement cooling. In this study, fluidic oscillators capable of producing pulsating jets were used to cool a heated surface and were then compared to equivalent steady jets. Although pulsating jets can be produced using a number of devices, fluidic oscillators offer the advantage of not having any moving parts. These oscillators are sustained by a self-induced internal flow instability and can function at different scales. Although the major part of this work is based on prototypes that produce jets with sub-millimetric widths, designs at one tenth that scale, i.e. with an exit slot width of 50 µm, are also presented. Reynolds numbers ranging from Re D = 3500 to 5250 and jet-to-plate spacing from 1 D to 10 D were studied (where D is the initial width of the jet). The Nusselt number distribution is found for each case and a comparison is made between the performance of equivalent steady and pulsating jets based on the average Nusselt number