Effect of tilt angle and base plate design on the performance of a loop heat pipe driven by vapor–liquid injector

Abstract

With the rapid development of microelectronics technology and the increasing heat flux of electronic devices, loop heat pipes have garnered significant attention for their highly efficient passive heat transfer performance. However, the heat transfer performance of conventional loop heat pipes is impaired by the heat leakage, and the maximum heat flux is unable to meet the heat dissipation requirement of high-heat-flux devices. To solve this problem, a loop heat pipe with a vapor-driven injector (LHPI) was previously proposed. However, only the heat transfer performance of the horizontally-placed LHPI had been investigated in the preliminary stage, and the effect of gravity on the heat transfer performance was not further discussed. Now in this paper, a 360° rotatable experimental bench is designed to investigate the influence of the tilt angle on the performance of LHPI. In addition, a capillary wick is integrally sintered with the trough baseplate and the microcolumn baseplate of the LHPI, respectively, to reduce the thermal resistance between them. The results show that the heat transfer performance of LHPI is significantly affected by its tilt angle. In the horizontal condition, LHPI exhibits the lowest baseplate temperature and thermal resistance, and the best heat transfer performance, which verifies its applications in engineering. Integral sintering increases the maximum thermal load from 300 W to 350 W under stable operation conditions of LHPI. The maximum thermal load of the integrated micro pin-finned baseplate reaches 500 W, which improves the heat dissipation effect by 42 % in heat dissipation compared to the trough baseplate under the same conditions., providing an improvement angle for the traditional LHP.