Design of a Prototype EHD Air Pump for Electronic Chip Cooling Applications

This paper presents the design, optimization and fabrication of an EHD air pump intended for high-power electronic chip cooling applications. Suitable high-voltage electrode configurations were selected and studied, in terms of the characteristics of the generated electric field, which play an important role in ionic wind flow. For this purpose, dedicated software is used to implement finite element analysis. Critical design parameters, such as the electric field intensity, wind velocity, current flow and power consumption are investigated. Two different laboratory prototypes are fabricated and their performances experimentally assessed. This procedure leads to the fabrication of a final prototype, which is then tested as a replacement of a typical fan for cooling a high power density electronic chip. To assist towards that end, an experimental thermal testing setup is designed and constructed to simulate the size of a personal computer's CPU core of variable power. The parametric study leads to the fabrication of experimental single-stage EHD pumps, the optimal design of which is capable of delivering an air flow of 51 CFM with an operating voltage of 10.5 kV. Finally, the theoretical and experimental results are evaluated and potential applications are proposed.