An Experimental Study on the Thermal Performance of the Flat Heat Pipe

Abstract

As the rapid growing of the semiconductor logic gate number and operation speed, the heat dissipated from electronic devices increases drastically. Moreover, most of the heat flux can reach about 100 W/cm2, therefore efficient removal of the heat from the electronic devices is essential to ensure the reliable operation of the electronic devices. The traditional direct cooling system, such as air cooling, liquid cooling, would not be able to transfer the high heat flux owing to their heat transfer limits, so advanced cooling solutions are necessary. The flat heat pipes have some advantages, such as small scale, strong heat transfer capacity, low weight penalty and low environmental requirements, therefore, in recent years, researchers have shown great interest for the flat heat pipe. But most of them played the important on the structure design of the flat heat pipes, and few of them focused on the study of the effect of the working fluid on the heat transfer performance. In this paper, a flat heat pipe with rectangular channel is designed and manufactured, and an experimental set up was built to study working fluid on the effects of the flat heat Pipe thermal performance. The flat heat pipe is heated via a 35mmx20mm rectangular electrical resistance (the evaporator side), and the other side (the condenser side) is cooled by convection of a heat sink. In the experimental work, three types of working fluid are used in the heat pipe: (A) deionized water, (B) deionized water-based Fe3O4 nano fluid (1, 1.5wt%). A comparison is performed for the thermal performance of different size flat heat pipe. Finally, the experimental results showed that nano fluid could improve the thermal performance of the FHP. With the same charge volume, the heat transfer coefficient of the FHPs filled with nano fluid were higher than that of DI water. There was an optimal mass concentration which was estimated to be 1.5 wt% to achieve the maximum heat transfer enhancement.