Experimental study on temperature uniformity and heat transfer performance of nitrogen loop heat pipe with large area and multi-heat source

Abstract

• A large area loop heat pipe with multiple heat sources is designed. • The temperature uniformity and heat transfer performance are tested. • The heat pipe starts up and operates smoothly in anti-gravity. With the development of space technology, the requirements of thermal control on spacecraft are increasing. In space missions, due to the improvement of the detection accuracy, the diameter of deep space telescope is becoming larger and larger. These detection instruments need efficient and reliable thermal management. Thus, the application of the large-scale cryogenic cooling technology, which can provide heat dissipation for the continuous and long life of the detector, has become a difficult problem. In the present study, a large-area cryogenic loop heat pipe is designed for the optical telescope. It is a good combination of multi heat source and large-area cryogenic loop heat pipe. The main evaporator is cylindrical due to fit the lens barrel. The heat exchange area can reach 1 m 2 , and the average temperature performance is less than 5 K. The condenser adopts the form of parallel pipeline to further reduce the system resistance and ensure the smooth operation of loop heat pipe. Its operation stability and temperature uniformity of the main evaporator under different total loads are experimentally studied and analyzed. It is proved that the loop heat pipe is feasible for large area multi-heat source cryogenic loop heat pipe in engineering. It can also start up and run normally under anti-gravity conditions. The experimental results show that the large area multi-source heat collection cryogenic loop heat pipe can be started and run normally in the temperature range of 80–120 K.