Three-dimensional simulation and artificial neural network optimization of a flat plate heat pipe for the cooling of telecommunication equipment

Abstract

To address the significantly increased heat dissipation requirements of 5G base stations, a flat plate heat pipe (FPHP) of 500 × 200 × 3 mm3 comprising of 19 independent channels was developed. To solve the problem of simulation distortion due to the high superheat of the initial boiling of the working fluid in the ultra-long channel of 490 × 5 × 1.5 mm3, this paper adopts the Lee model considering the superheat, and simulates based on the Volume of fluid method, and the simulation results are compared with the experiments, and the average relative error is less than 5 %. The FPHP was explored at 100–500 W heat power and filling ratio of 30 %-70 %, depending on the application scenarios of the base station. By partitioning the 19 channels and calculating the thermal resistance of the FPHP based, an Artificial neural network (ANN) model with 10 hidden layer nodes is established based on 675 data sets. The results showed that the mean square error and correlation coefficient were 1.30 × 10-5 and 0.9990. The ANN prediction results are validated, the mean relative error is 5.4 %, demonstrating that the ANN model can be an effective tool to optimize the FPHP for the telecommunication equipment.