THERMAL ANALYSIS AND FLOW VISUALIZATION OF A FLAT LOOP HEAT PIPE

Md Monir Hossain,John P. Kizito

doi:10.5098/fhp.7.5

Abstract

THERMAL ANALYSIS AND FLOW VISUALIZATION OF A FLAT LOOP HEAT PIPE

Highlights

Loop heat pipe has raised interest in thermal management of high heat generating electronic devices (Sauciuc et al, 2005)
Evaporator thermal resistance is defined as follows where ܶ௘ is the temperature in evaporator, ܶ௩ is the temperature in vapor line and ܳ is the applied thermal load
After the vapor groove and vapor line is free of liquid, the generated vapor in the evaporator directly comes to the condenser

Summary

INTRODUCTION

Loop heat pipe has raised interest in thermal management of high heat generating electronic devices (Sauciuc et al, 2005). For LHP, it is important to investigate the behavior of the fluid inside the evaporator and in condenser where the phase changes take place and other components of loop. The visualization process explained here will help us to understand the physical phenomenon such as two phase flow during startup, bubble formation and collapse in the condenser and compensation chamber during the LHP operation. Main structure of LHP was fabricated inside acrylic plastic block to perform visual investigations on different components to describe the operational process at different stages of startup process. In the current study, to visualize the processes, main components of LHP were fabricated inside an acrylic plastic block (Figure 2) Beside transparency, another advantage of the acrylic plastic was low heat loss from loop to surrounding environment. Detail of the experimental setup can be found in (Hossain and Kizito, 2015)

TESTING PROCEDURE

RESULT

Thermal behavior of condenser

Transient behavior of evaporator

Visualization of operation in LHP

CONCLUSIONS