Thermal Performance of a Heat Pipe with Two Dissimilar Condensers for a Medium-Temperature Thermal Storage System

Min Kyu  Park; Joon Hong  Boo

doi:10.6180/jase.2012.15.2.05

Thermal Performance of a Heat Pipe with Two Dissimilar Condensers for a Medium-Temperature Thermal Storage System

Min Kyu Park¹ and Joon Hong Boo This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.²

¹Graduate School, Korea Aerospace University, 200-1 Hwajeon, Goyang, Gyeonggi-do, 412-791 Korea
²School of Aerospace and Mechanical Engineering, Korea Aerospace University, 200-1 Hwajeon, Goyang, Gyeonggi-do, 412-791 Korea

Received: May 12, 2012
Accepted: May 18, 2012
Publication Date: June 1, 2012

Download Citation: ||https://doi.org/10.6180/jase.2012.15.2.05

ABSTRACT

An experimental study was conducted to investigate the thermal performance of a heat pipe having two dissimilar condenser sections which were subject to different boundary conditions. The first condenser dissipated heat to the surrounding air through annular fins by natural convection, while the second one was cooled by a liquid by forced convection at different temperatures. The container and the wick were made of stainless steel and the working fluid was Dowtherm-A, which is used for medium-temperature applications. The diameter and length of the heat pipe were 25.4 mm and 1 m, respectively. The maximum thermal load was 1 kW and the operating temperature of the heat pipe was around 250 °C. The liquid fill charge was adjusted so that the first condenser section might work as an evaporator when the original evaporator was inactive in a vertical configuration. The experimental results were analyzed in terms of thermal resistance and effective thermal conductivity against input heat flux and operating temperature.

Keywords: Heat Pipe, Medium-High Temperature, Dissimilar Condensers, Experiment

REFERENCES

[1] Faghri, A., Heat Pipe Science and Technology, Taylor and Francis, pp. 1924 (1995).
[2] Reay, D. and Kew, P., Heat Pipes, Elsevier, pp. 108114 (2006).
[3] Park, K. H., Lee, Y. S., Na, S. H. and Chang, K. C., “An Experimental Study on the Operating Characteristics of the Naphthalene and Dowtherm Heat Pipe,” Proc. KSME Annual Meeting, pp. 19661971 (2006).
[4] Liu, Z., Wang, Z. and Ma, C., “An Experimental Study on Heat Transfer Characteristics of Heat Pipe Heat Exchanger with Latent Heat Storage. Part I: Charging Only and Discharging only Modes,” Energy Conversion and Management, Vol. 47, pp. 944966 (2006).
[5] Lee, S. K., Kwak, H. H., Boo, J. H., Kim, J. K. and Kang, Y. H., “Thermal Performance of a Dowtherm-A Heat Pipe for the Thermal Storage System at Medium-High Temperature,” Proc. KSME Fall Annual Conference, pp. 16451650 (2009).