Study and development of fluidic oscillators for heat removal

Abstract : The aim of this project is to evaluate the viability of fluidic oscillators as a means of improving heat transfer rates. The particular device considered herein produces two out-of-phase pulsed impinging jets as opposed to the sweeping jets inherent to other designs in the field of fluidics. The first stage of this project will consist in studying a sub-millimeter prototype (whose smallest channel is200μm wide), both numeri-cally and experimentally, to figure out whether or not improving heat transfer rates is possible. A parametric study is conducted to better understand the effects of pulsation frequency, waveform, amplitude as well as a number of geometric factors such as nozzle-to-plate distance. The prototype is made by stereo-lithography using a medical-grade polymer. The temperature field is measured using an infrared camera. This prelimi-nary study showed qualitative agreement with the literature in terms of the shape of the temperature profiles.