Experimental Investigation on Flow and Heat Transfer Characteristics of a Needle-Cylinder Type Ionic Wind Generator for LED Cooling

Abstract

Ionic wind cooling for electronic elements is a relevant research field. In order to study the cooling performance of ionic wind on a Light Emitting Diode (LED), an ionic wind generator with a needles-ring electrode configuration was set up. A cylindrical heat sink for the heat dissipation of a heating film representing the LED chip was also manufactured. Following this, the effect of the needle number, the distance between the needles and the ring electrode, and the polarity of the corona discharge on the ionic wind velocity were studied. Finally, the optimal distance between the needles and the ring electrode was adopted to attain the maximum wind velocity with different numbers of needles. After this, the ionic wind device was used to cool the heating film at the working power of 10 watts. The surface temperature of the heating film was measured to evaluate the cooling performance of the ionic wind device. The experimental results indicate that the maximum temperature drop in the heating film center reaches 35.6 °C in the five needle-electrode case, which is very effective and can meet the demands of a 10 watts LED heat dissipation.

Keywords

• ionic wind
• corona discharge
• LED
• heat sink
• cooling
• electrode