HEAT TRANSFER ENHANCEMENT USING PIEZOELECTRIC FAN IN ELECTRONIC COOLING - EXPERIMENTAL AND NUMERICAL OBSERVATIONS

Piezoelectric fan is an innovative design and feasible solution to remove heat from microelectronic systems for portable electronic products. It is small in size, has low power consumption and minimal noise. This paper presents experimental and computational investigations of incompressible three-dimensional streaming flows induced by piezoelectric fan and the associated heat transfer enhancement, on a Plastic Leaded Chip Carrier (PLCC) package. Piezoelectric fan (piezofan) is arranged at two different heights normal to the heat source surface (in each case, the normalized gap δ = G/lp) and tested for its performance, compared to the base case (natural convection or no fan). The flow field is observed and captured by means of a particle image velocimetry (PIV) system. The heat transfer coefficient in each case is also computed. The finite volume based computational fluid dynamics package, FLUENT 6.3.2 is used to investigate the heat transfer coefficient and the flow fields using a dynamic mesh option. The result shows that the piezofan yields significant improvement in heat transfer, and a normalized gap of 0.106 is offered a better cooling compared to the 0.0604. The experimental results are in good agreement with the predicted results.