A Critical Review on Flow and Heat Transfer Characteristics of Synthetic Jet

Extensive research has been carried out to meet the cooling demand of high heat flux electrical and electronic devices. Among the emerging cooling technologies, synthetic jet (SJ) cooling has proved to be an efficient and compact candidate. This paper presents a comprehensive review on the effect of numerous geometrical and actuation parameters on the flow dynamics and heat transfer behaviour of synthetic jet cooling. The parameters studied include orifice to surface spacing, stroke length, frequency of excitation, orifice shape, orifice plate thickness, cavity shape, jet vectoring, and the acoustic aspect. The present studies also extended the discussion on a novel dual synthetic jet (DSJ) and SJ embedded heat sink. Furthermore, the flow and heat transfer characteristics of the SJ are compared with the baseline case of the continuous jet. Among the studied parameters, it is found that orifice geometry, excitation frequency, amplitude, etc. play a vital role in SJ's thermal performance. Also, careful selection of the multi-orifice jet parameters can be employed for mitigating the recirculation effects of a single orifice SJ. New research areas have been identified to enable the effective implementation of SJ for high heat flux electronics cooling.