Author(s)

Kimihide Odagiri¹, Masahito Nishikawara², Hosei Nagano³

¹Department of Aerospace Engineering, Nagoya University, Nagoya, Japan.
²Department of Mechanical Engineering, Toyohashi University of Technology, Toyohashi, Japan.
³Department of Mechanical Science and Engineering, Nagoya University, Nagoya, Japan.

Loop Heat Pipe (LHP) performance strongly depends on the performance of a wick that is porous media inserted in an evaporator. In this paper, the visualization results of thermo-fluid behavior on the surface of the wick with microscopic infrared thermography were reported. In this study, 2 different samples that simulated a part of wick in the evaporator were used. The wicks were made by different two materials: polytetrafluoroethylene (PTFE) and stainless steel (SUS). The pore radii of PTFE wick and SUS wick are 1.2 μm and 22.5 μm. The difference of thermo-fluid behavior that was caused by the difference of material was investigated. These two materials include 4 different properties: pore radius, thermal conductivity, permeability and porosity. In order to investigate the effect of the thermal conductivity on wick’s operating mode, the phase diagram on the q-k_eff plane was made. Based on the temperature line profiles, two operating modes: mode of heat conduction and mode of convection were observed. The effective thermal conductivity of the porous media has strong effect on the operating modes. In addition, the difference of heat leak through the wick that was caused by the difference of the material was discussed.

Evaporator, Liquid-Vapor Phase Change, Loop Heat Pipe, Microscale Infrared Observation, Porous Media

Odagiri, K. , Nishikawara, M. and Nagano, H. (2016) Microscale Infrared Observation of Liquid-Vapor Phase Change Process on the Surface of Porous Media for Loop Heat Pipe. Journal of Electronics Cooling and Thermal Control, 6, 33-41. doi: 10.4236/jectc.2016.62003.