Visualization research on influencing factors of flat heat pipes

Abstract

Flat heat pipes can effectively spread a concentrated high power heat source in a small region into a larger heat dissipation area, which is widely used in the thermal management of electronic devices. In this paper, two different sintered copper powder wick structures are designed to study the effect of porous column height on the heat transfer performance. The results show that the best performance is achieved at the 30% filling ratio under the 15 ℃ cooling water with all the porous columns contacting with the condenser. The heat power is 312.7 W and the thermal resistance is 0.192 ℃/W. As the cooling water temperature increases, the evaporation rate increases, resulting in a decrease in the thermal resistance. But the decrease in temperature difference causes the decline in heat dissipation power. Through the visual observation, it is found that the porous column contacting with the condenser can not only play the role of support and liquid reflow pathway, but also serve as an effective evaporation area to improve the heat transfer performance. While the low porous column cannot transport the condensed liquid and is completely immersed by the liquid under the high filling ratio, which is difficult to promote evaporation rate. In order to improve the performance at air cooling situation, an integrated heat pipe combined the flat heat pipe and fin tubes is designed, which can achieve a heat power of 259.8 W and present excellent temperature uniformity. This research provides the guidelines to optimize the heat transfer performance of porous column wick structures.