Thermal performance comparison of oscillating heat pipes with and without helical micro-grooves

Abstract

This paper presents an experimental investigation to compare the thermal performance of three closed loop oscillating heat pipes (OHPs) with and without internal helical microgrooves at vertical and horizontal orientations. All of these OHPs were made from copper tubes and have three turns with lengths of 70, 230 and 110 mm at the evaporator, adiabatic and condenser sections, respectively. Deionized water was used as the working fluid at a volumetric filling ratio of 50%. The internal diameters (IDs) of two smooth-tube OHPs are 4.0 and 4.8 mm, respectively, and the internal diameter of micro-grooved OHP without groove structures is about 4.5 mm. Experimental results demonstrated that the addition of groove structures make the OHP remarkably outperform smooth-tube OHPs in both effective thermal conductivity and thermal resistance. The thermal resistance of vertically-oriented micro-grooved OHP could be lowered to 0.057 °C/W associated with an effective thermal conductivity of 6.1 × 104 W/ (m·K) at the input heat flux of 3.8 × 104 W/m2. Compared to smooth-tube OHPs, preliminary mechanism analysis reveals that local heat transfer coefficients both at the heating and cooling sections of micro-grooved OHP could be significantly improved. Moreover, enhanced liquid backflow to the evaporator due to microgroove-induced capillarity is also responsible for the OHP performance enhancement.