A Study on Manufacture and Performance Evaluation of a Loop Heat Pipe System with a Cylindrical Evaporator for IGBT Cooling

전력반도체 냉각을 위한 원통형 루프히트파이프 제작 및 성능 평가에 관한 연구

The Loop Heat Pipe (LHP) operates to pump the working fluid by means of the capillary force in a wick structure. Particularly, it is difficult to design and manufacture the evaporator consisted of a grooved container and a compensation chamber as well as the wick structure. This study is related to design and manufacture the grooved container coupled with wick structure, the properties of the wick structure such as the permeability, the porosity, and the maximum capillary pressure were measured to apply the cooling technology for Insulated Gate Bipolar Transistor (IGBT). The container of the LHP was manufactured by the electrical discharge process and the wick structure was sintered with the nickel particle by an axial-press apparatus with the pulse electronic discharge. As results, the properties of the wick were experimentally obtained about 60% of the porosity, 35kPa of the maximum capillary force and $1.53{\times}10-13m2$ of the permeability.