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ISSN Online: 2379-1748
7th Thermal and Fluids Engineering Conference (TFEC)
SJR:
0.152
SNIP:
0.14
CiteScore™::
0.5
Indexed in
DEVELOPMENT AND INVESTIGATION OF AN ADDITIVELY MANUFACTURED HEAT PIPE
Abstract
This investigation describes the development and testing of an additively manufactured (AM) heat pipe fabricated by Laser Powder Bed Fusion (LPBF). The flat, two-piece heat pipe design consists of: (i) the AM wick structure and (ii) a cover to enclose the wick. The porous structure of the wick was fabricated using LPB-F from aluminum alloy AlSi10Mg, while the pipe front casing was machined from Al 6061. Three 3D porous architectures were developed by propagating the wick structural geometry with different shapes of unit cells: (i) body-centered cubic (BCC), (ii) simple cubic (SC), and (iii) Voronoi. The strut thickness was kept constant at 0.3 mm for all samples.
The rate-of-rise method was used to characterize the hydraulic performance for all the wicks (permeability, K and
effective pore radius, reff). Then, heat pipe experiments were carried out to investigate their thermal performance with two charges of acetone in the horizontal and vertical orientations. It was found that the SC wick achieved
superior capillarity performance, i.e., higher K/reff. The thermal results showed that the vertical orientation, with the condenser located above the evaporator, achieved a lower total thermal resistance and higher heat transport capacity; this pertains to the additional gravity-assisted flow, i.e., partially working as a thermosyphon. Among all the wicks, the SC achieved the lowest thermal resistance of 1.39 K/W and 0.49 K/W in the horizontal and the vertical orientations, representing 3.5 and 11 times less than the dry conditions.