Design and CFD Analysis of Wickless Heat Pipes Filled with Refrigerants as Working Fluids for HVAC Applications

Abstract

Heat pipes are heat transfer devices with very good thermal conductivity. Heat pipes with refrigerants as working fluids were investigated. The refrigerants used in this work are R134a and R404a. Gravity-assisted heat pipe was preferred to this application. The various heat transfer limits in the design of heat pipes were found. The thermal performance of the heat pipes was studied by computational fluid dynamics method. ANSYS Fluent 16.0 was used to perform the CFD analysis. VOF method was employed. Very low heat input was applied for this particular application. The temperature distribution along the length of the heat pipe was studied. The CFD results are validated with the experimental values of the reference work. The thermal resistance values are found and compared with the experimental work. Optimization was performed using Taguchi technique.