EXPERIMENTATION ON HEAT PIPE AND CFD ANALYSIS FOR PERFORMANCE ENHANCEMENT

Abstract

Heat Pipe is a heat transfer device used in many applications and it is very similar in some respects to the thermosyphon. Since there were several limitations of thermosyphon, heat pipe was developed. The idea of the heat pipe was first suggested in 1942, since then over a several decades the serious development of a heat pipe took place. Heat pipe mainly consists of three regions viz. evaporator, adiabatic and condenser section. The heat pipe differs from the thermosyphon by virtue of its ability to transport heat against gravity by an evaporation-condensation cycle. This research work includes experimentation on available heat pipe, development of CFD model and its validation with experimental results using CFD Tool. The results obtained by CFD are in good agreement with an experimental results. Since the heat pipe is used for transferring the heat, this research work focuses on increasing the heat transfer by modified model, modifications in terms of increased surface area, is proposed. From CFD analysis it was found that the proposed modified heat pipe shows enhancement in performance in terms of heat transfer rate by 19% when it is simulated for without heat sink case and 45% while with heat sink case, compared to conventional heat pipe. The mixture multiphase model from CFD too is used for simulation of heat pipe.