HEAT TRANSFER PERFORMANCE OF A SELFOSCILLATING HEAT PIPE USING PURE WATER AND EFFECT OF INCLINATION TO THIS PERFORMANCE

Abstract

This experimental study is performed to investigate heat transfer performance and effect of
inclinations to a self-oscillating heat pipe developed. In this experiment, pure water is
employed as the working fluid. The heat pipe is composed of a heating section, a cooling
section and an adiabatic section. The heating and cooling sections have the same size and
are connected by four circular parallel pipes. The corresponding external dimensions are
45mm in length, 45mm in width and 8mm in thickness, and the internal dimensions are
42mm, 42mm and 5mm, respectively. The adiabatic section is consisted of four parallel
circular pipes whose dimension is 6 (external diameter) x 5 (internal diameter) x 45
(length) mm. According to the experimental results, the effective thermal conductivity of
the heat pipe in the case of fill charge ratio at 100% is higher than that of 30%
and this effective thermal conductivity is decreased when the angle between the axis
of the heat pipes and vertical direction is increased.