Abstract Because of their effectiveness and adaptability, impinging jets have found their way into a host of applications ranging from cooling turbine blades, to heat management of electronic systems or even lowering the temperature of a hot cup of coffee in the morning. With constantly increasing demand for efficient and compact cooling systems in certain industries, such as the aerospace or electronics industries, variations on the textbook-setup of an impinging jet have been studied over the years. One such variation introduces a periodic disturbance into the jet that can have an effect on both the structure of flow and the thermal boundary layer at the target surface. In what follows is a short overview of studies having used pulsed jets, often in tandem with other modifications, to try and improve heat transfer. Special attention was also given to the methods by which the periodic disturbance can be produced since they involve setups of different levels of complexity and having different implementation costs.