Experimental and Numerical Investigation of the Fluidstructure Interaction of Piezo fan Systems

Piezo fans consist of a piezoelectric material bonded to a passive elastic plate. They aim at converting electric energy into mechanical vibrations and air flow in order to provide efficient localized cooling of electronic circuits or to generate propulsion of micro air vehicles. A sufficiently large dynamic tip defection is obtained when the structure is operated at resonance. In this PhD research, multiphysics analytical and numerical calculations are performed in order to characterize, design and optimize piezo fan systems. In particular, 2D and 3D fluid structure interaction (FSI) are performed by coupling computational fluid dynamics (CFD) and structural finite element simulations. The calculated flow fields and vibration shapes of the piezo fan systems are compared extensively with experiments using high speed particle image velocimetry (PIV) and scanning laser Doppler bibrometry (LDV). In addition, the cooling efficiency of the piezo fan system was characterized experimentally using infrared thermography measurements.