A Study on the Internal Flow Patterns and Heat Transfer Characteristics for a Cylindrical Rotating Heat Pipe

원통형 회전 히트파이프의 내부 유동 및 열전달 특성에 관한 연구

In order to elucidate the operational characteristics of rotating heat pipes, the internal flow patterns and heat transfer performance are investigated. Flow patterns and its transition are studied with various rotational speeds by visualizing flows established inside a rotating tube. To verify those results of analysis, 2 heat pipes of the same geometries but fill charge rates of 7, 30% were manufactured and submitted to operating tests. Comparison of experimental results on heat transfer rate show a fairly good agreement with the analytical results. The analysis reveals that the optimum charge ratio is ranged in 4~7% depending on the quantity of thermal loads. but the heat pipe with 7% of fill charge ratio reached dry-out limitation at heat flux of $q^{{\prime}{\prime}}=6.2kW/m^2$ lower than that of analytic results. Transition of flow regime was well related to the correlation by Semena & Khmelev on transient centrifugal Froude Number Frc. But hysteresis phenomenon was observed in transition of flow regime, when the rotational speed was stepwisely changed in the way to undergo 1 cycle.