Numerical development of EHD cooling systems for laptop applications

Electrohydrodynamic (EHD) air blowers are uniquely positioned to overcome the limitations of miniaturized mechanical fans in small-scale and consumer electronic devices. A novel cooling system design using optimized EHD blowers integrated with a plate-fin heat sink is presented and proposed for thin consumer electronics such as laptop applications. A three-dimensional (3D) numerical model is developed and validated to solve the coupled equations of EHD flow and conjugate heat transfer and predict the cooling performance of the integrated EHD system. For a range of heat sink heights from 6 to 12 mm, a parametric study is performed to investigate the influence of geometric parameters and operating conditions on the thermal performance of the EHD systems based on heat sink thermal resistance and the highest operating temperature. Numerical results demonstrate that the proposed EHD cooling system is able to provide effective cooling performance and maintain the temperature within the safe and typical operating range. Under a range of thermal design power (TDP) up to 30 W, trends of predicted operating temperatures show that the developed EHD cooling systems have great potential to compete with mechanical blowers in low-profile laptops with higher TDP, lower device height and reduced installation volume compared to a selected list of current standard laptops available commercially.