Thermal Conductivity and Operating Temperature Effect on the Interline Region in a Micro/Miniature Heat Pipe

Author(s):  
Hani H. Sait ◽  
Steve M. Demsky ◽  
HongBin Ma

An analytical model describing thin film evaporation is developed that includes the effects of surface tension, frictional shear stress, wetting characteristics and disjoining pressure. The effects of thermal conductivity of working fluids and operating temperature on the evaporating thin film region are also studied. The results indicate that when the thermal conductivity of the working fluid increases, a high heat flux can be removed from the evaporating thin film region. The operating temperature affects the thin film evaporation. The higher the operating temperature, the more heat flux can be removed from the region. The information of thin film evaporation presented in the paper results in a better understanding of heat transfer mechanism occurring in micro heat pipes.

Author(s):  
Tadej Semenic ◽  
Ying-Yu Lin ◽  
Ivan Catton

Boiling characteristics of three biporous and one monoporous sintered wick are tested. The monoporous wick has the same wick thickness as a comparable biporous wick. Diameters of the clusters of the comparable biporous wick are equal to the powder diameter of the monoporous wick. A second biporous wick has the same configuration as the first, but is sintered in a thicker layer. The third biporous wick that is tested has smaller cluster sizes then the first two. All three biporous wicks have clusters sintered from powder with the same size distribution. The results demonstrate the advantages of a biporous capillary structure. All biporous wicks reached higher critical heat flux (CHF) then the monoporous wick. Experiments show that larger clusters are better than smaller. Comparing two different wick thicknesses, we can see that even though there is a dryout region inside the thick wick, it is still able to continuously remove heat at constant superheat. No sudden changes in superheat are seen. This process of heat removal is not possible with the thin wick. The working fluid in all runs is methanol. 4-mm thick wick with powder diameter ranging from 53 to 63 microns and cluster diameter ranging from 500 to 707microns is able to remove 377W/cm2 at temperature difference 110°C. A partial pressure inside the test chamber at this heat flux is 0.68atm and the interface temperature 167°C.


2012 ◽  
Vol 516-517 ◽  
pp. 84-87 ◽  
Author(s):  
Lei Yu ◽  
Wei Qiang Liu

This paper has built a mathematical model for the evaporating characteristics of the grooved micro heat pipe’s thin film region and computed them in a specific working condition. The evaporating model of Wayner was employed in this mathematical model. The results from computation showed, for the H2O and NH3 as working fluid, at the beginning of the thin film region, the heat flux raised rapidly to a peak value and then declined to almost 0 also rapidly in a very short distance. Differently, for the Na and K as working fluid, the heat flux raised quickly but declined slower. Therefore, the alkali metals working fluids had larger area of high heat flux covered. The results indicated that the alkali metals working fluid has better evaporating characteristics for the high-temperature heat pipe than normal working fluids.


Author(s):  
Minhua Lu ◽  
Larry Mok ◽  
R. J. Bezama

A vapor chamber using high thermal conductivity and permeability graphite foam as a wick has been designed, built and tested. With ethanol as the working fluid, the vapor chamber has been demonstrated at a heat flux of 80 W/cm2. The effects of the capillary limit, the boiling limit, and the thermal resistance in restricting the overall performance of a vapor chamber have been analyzed. Because of the high thermal conductivity of the graphite foams, the modeling results show that the performance of a vapor chamber using a graphite foam is about twice that of one using a copper wick structure. Furthermore, if water is used as the working fluid instead of ethanol, the performance of the vapor chamber will be increased further. Graphite foam vapor chambers with water as the working fluid can be made by treating the graphite foam with an oxygen plasma to improve the wetting of the graphite by the water.


Author(s):  
Solomon Adera ◽  
Rishi Raj ◽  
Evelyn N. Wang

Thermal management is increasingly becoming a bottleneck for a variety of high power density applications such as integrated circuits, solar cells, microprocessors, and energy conversion devices. The performance and reliability of these devices are usually limited by the rate at which heat can be removed from the device footprint, which averages well above 100 W/cm2 (locally this heat flux can exceed 1000 W/cm2). State-of-the-art air cooling strategies which utilize the sensible heat are insufficient at these large heat fluxes. As a result, novel thermal management solutions such as via thin-film evaporation that utilize the latent heat of vaporization of a fluid are needed. The high latent heat of vaporization associated with typical liquid-vapor phase change phenomena allows significant heat transfer with small temperature rise. In this work, we demonstrate a promising thermal management approach where square arrays of cylindrical micropillar arrays are used for thin-film evaporation. The microstructures control the liquid film thickness and the associated thermal resistance in addition to maintaining a continuous liquid supply via the capillary pumping mechanism. When the capillary-induced liquid supply mechanism cannot deliver sufficient liquid for phase change heat transfer, the critical heat flux is reached and dryout occurs. This capillary limitation on thin-film evaporation was experimentally investigated by fabricating well-defined silicon micropillar arrays using standard contact photolithography and deep reactive ion etching. A thin film resistive heater and thermal sensors were integrated on the back side of the test sample using e-beam evaporation and acetone lift-off. The experiments were carried out in a controlled environmental chamber maintained at the water saturation pressure of ≈3.5 kPa and ≈25 °C. We demonstrated significantly higher heat dissipation capability in excess of 100 W/cm2. These preliminary results suggest the potential of thin-film evaporation from microstructured surfaces for advanced thermal management applications.


Author(s):  
Olubunmi Popoola ◽  
Ayobami Bamgbade ◽  
Yiding Cao

An effective design option for a cooling system is to use a two-phase pumped cooling loop to simultaneously satisfy the temperature uniformity and high heat flux requirements. A reciprocating-mechanism driven heat loop (RMDHL) is a novel heat transfer device that could attain a high heat transfer rate through a reciprocating flow of the two-phase working fluid inside the heat transfer device. Although the device has been tested and validated experimentally, analytical or numerical study has not been undertaken to understand its working mechanism and provide guidance for the device design. The objective of this paper is to develop a numerical model for the RMDHL to predict its operational performance under different working conditions. The developed numerical model has been successfully validated by the existing experimental data and will provide a powerful tool for the design and performance optimization of future RMDHLs. The study also reveals that the maximum velocity in the flow occurs near the wall rather than at the center of the pipe, as in the case of unidirectional steady flow. This higher velocity near the wall may help to explain the enhanced heat transfer of an RMDHL.


Author(s):  
Hailei Wang ◽  
Richard Peterson

Flow boiling and heat transfer enhancement in four parallel microchannels using a dielectric working fluid, HFE 7000, was investigated. Each channel was 1000 μm wide and 510 μm high. A unique channel surface enhancement technique via diffusion bonding a layer of conductive fine wire mesh onto the heating wall was developed. According to the obtained flow boiling curves for both the bare and mesh channels, the amount of wall superheat was significantly reduced for the mesh channel at all stream-wise locations. This indicated that the nucleate boiling in the mesh channel was enhanced due to the increase of nucleation sites the mesh introduced. Both the nucleate boiling dominated and convective evaporation dominated regimes were identified. In addition, the overall trend for the flow boiling heat transfer coefficient, with respect to vapor quality, was increasing until the vapor quality reached approximately 0.4. The critical heat flux (CHF) for the mesh channel was also significantly higher than that of the bare channel in the low vapor quality region. Due to the fact of how the mesh was incorporated into the channels, no pressure drop penalty was identified for the mesh channels. Potential applications for this kind of mesh channel include high heat-flux electronic cooling systems and various energy conversion systems.


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