A Novel Quick Qmax Test Method and Experimental Investigation of Heat Pipes

Abstract

In traditional heat pipe performance test, to keep an adiabatic temperature at a constant value, the evaporator wall temperature would be slowly increased when the thermal power was step input to the evaporator of the heat pipe. The maximum heat transfer rate (Qmax) was then defined that when the evaporator wall temperature rapidly increased at a certain amount of power input to the heat pipe. However, it is not easy to distinguish this sharp increased curve and sometimes result in the wrong Qmax data. In addition, it took too long for waiting the evaporator temperature approach to a steady state, thus this process could not use be for the fully check Qmax of the heat pipe. In this paper, we propose a novel quick test method to predict the maximum heat dissipation of the heat pipes namely Dynamic-Temperature-Tracing (D.T.T). The concept of the D.T.T was when we tracing the evaporator and the adiabatic wall temperature, these two temperature curves should be the same trend before the dry-out phenomena was occurred. Theoretically, when the dry-out start to occur in the heat pipe, the adiabatic temperature profile was no longer kept the same temperature profile as that of the evaporator. Hence, the maximum heat dissipate ability of the heat pipe was then easy to obtained at this measuring adiabatic temperature. The data were also compared with those obtained from the traditional standard method at the same equivalent evaporator length, condenser length and adiabatic temperature. In this experiments, sinter powder and groove heat pipes with diameter 6mm 8mm and 200mm length were selected as the capillary wick structure. Comparing with traditional method results, the errors of maximum heat transfer rate are less than 15%. The results also shown D.T.T. method is much fast and reliable compare with the traditional test method. This paper was also originally published as part of the Proceedings of the ASME 2005 Pacific Rim Technical Conference and Exhibition on Integration and Packaging of MEMS, NEMS, and Electronic Systems.