Abstract

The air flow around a cubic obstacle mounted on one wall of a rectangular channel was studied experimentally. The obstacle represents an electronic component and the channel the space between two parallel printed circuit boards (PCBs). The flow was produced by the combination of a channel stream and a jet which issued from a circular nozzle placed at the wall opposite from where the component is mounted. With this aim, a test rig was designed and built to carry out experiments with both the above mentioned configurations and other cooling arrangements. Planar Particle Image Velocimetry (PIV) was employed to measure the instantaneous flow velocity on several planes covering the space around the component. The mean velocity and the Reynolds stresses were obtained from averaging the instantaneous velocity, and the mean flow showed a complex pattern with different features such as recirculation bubbles, vortices, detachment and reattachment zones. The influence of two parameters, namely the channel Reynolds number and the jet-to-channel Reynolds number ratio, on these flow features was studied considering nine cases that combined three values of the channel Reynolds number (3410, 5752 and 8880) and three values of the ratio (0.5, 1.0 and 1.5). The results show that the Reynolds number ratio determines the drag produced on the jet and the deflection from its geometric axis due to the channel stream. In all the cases corresponding to the lowest value of the ratio, the jet was dragged and did not impact the component. This fact accounts for the non-existence of the Upper Horseshoe Vortex and changes in the flow characteristics at the region over the component. (C) 2012 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.