Heat Transfer Characterizations of Heat Pipe in Comparison With Copper Pipe

Abstract

The article presents some significant experimental data for studying the heat transfer behavior of heat pipe, which will further help the cooling efficiency improvement of the heat pipe cooler. It is well known that the heat pipe owns the extreme large heat conductivity and is often integrated with cooling plates for CPU cooling. The heat pipe uses special heat transfer techniques to obtain extremely large heat conductivity, which are the inside liquid evaporation for heat absorption and the inside microstructural capillarity for condensation. These special techniques yield the instant heat transfer from the heat source to the remote side directly, but the special heat transfer behavior is changed due to the integration with cooling plates. The destroyed heat transfer behavior of the heat pipe causes the cooling efficiency of the heat pipe cooler to be not able to reach a predicted good value. To improve the cooling efficiency of the heat pipe cooler we recover the original heat transfer behavior of the heat pipe integrated with cooling plates. This work first built a CPU simulator in accordance with the ASTM standard for heating the heat pipe, then uses the color schlieren technique to visualize the sequent heat flux nearby the heat pipe and the infrared thermal camera for quantitative temperature measurements synchronously. The result shows that the heat flux first appears at the opposite side from the heat source and there exhibits also the highest temperature. This is different from the heat transfer behavior of the copper pipe. Another very interesting result is that the heat flux of the cooling plate nearest to the heat source is first viewed than the others, which is similar to the integration with the copper pipe.