2014 Volume 7 Issue 1 Pages 123-131
This study describes a possibility of a pulsating airflow for an application to electronics cooling. Forced convection cooling by using fans is the most common strategy for dissipating heat from electronic devices. In high-density packaging electronic equipment, flow separation of the airflow decreases cooling performance of electronic components. In order to suppress the decrease of the cooling performance, we are now focusing on a generation of pulsating airflow. The flow separation around the electronic components may be inhibited by the airflow pulsation and the cooling performance rear the components may be improved. The pulsating airflow may be generated easily by controlling the input power of the cooling fans. However, in order to apply the pulsating flow to the cooling method of electronic equipment, whether the pulsating flow can enhance the cooling performance around the heating components or not should be clarified.
In this study, we experimentally investigated a cooling performance of a pulsating airflow around a cylindrical block that simulates electronic components. The pulsating airflow gave almost the same heat transfer performance as the steady airflow that the time-averaged flow rate was smaller than that of the pulsating flow. The pulsating flow may become the effective cooling method for next generation electronic equipment which can decrease the power consumption of the cooling fans while maintaining the cooling performance of the electronic components.
