• Transactions of the Korean Society of Mechanical Engineers B
• /
• v.36 no.9
• /
• pp.953-960
• /
• 2012

An AMTEC (alkali metal thermal electric converter) is a device that is used for the direct conversion of heat to electricity. Sodium is used as the working fluid, and its circulation is driven by a capillary wick. The wicks used for circulation include an evaporator wick, artery wick, and condenser wick, and each wick has a pressure drop because of the circulation of liquid and vapor. For the circulation of sodium, the capillary pressure of the evaporator wick must be greater than the total pressure drop in the wicks. In this study, the pressure drop in the evaporator wick, artery wick, and condenser wick and the heat loss from the evaporator to the condenser through the artery wick were analyzed for the design of a 100 W AMTEC prototype. It was found that a particle diameter of 10 ${\mu}m$ is suitable for the evaporator wick to maintain a capillary pressure greater than total pressure drop in the circulation loop.

• Proceedings of the KSME Conference
• /
• 2007.05b
• /
• pp.2130-2135
• /
• 2007

Operating characteristics of a loop heat pipe (LHP) having a bypass line was investigated experimentally. The LHP had a sintered metal wick as a capillary structure and methanol as a working fluid. The sintered metal wick was made of stainless steel of which the average pore size was 5 ${\mu}m$and porosity of 47%. A bypass line of a small diameter was attached between the vapor escape passage and the liquid reservoir. The dimension of the flat evaporator was $50(L){\times}40(W){\times}30(H)$ mm and that of the condenser was $50(L){\times}40(W){\times}11(H)$ mm. Wall and pipe material of the LHP was stainless steel and heating area was 35(W) mm${\times}$35(L) mm. The inner diameters of vapor and liquid transport lines were 4.0 mm and 2.0 mm, and the lengths of the two lines were both 0.5 m. The LHP was tested for three different tilt angles of horizontal, favorite tilt, and adverse tilt. The thermal load range was up to 290 W at the condenser above evaporation position. Furthermore, the effect of a bypass line on the start-up transient as well as steady-state operation was presented and discussed.

• Proceedings of the KSME Conference
• /
• 2008.11b
• /
• pp.2357-2362
• /
• 2008

LHP is different from a conventional heat pipes in design and heat and fluid flow passages. The situations of the former is much complex than the latter. In LHPs, evaporation occurs at the contact interface between the heating plate and the porous wick, so some micro channels machined at the contact interface serve to let the vapor flow out of the evaporator. This complexity of contact geometry was known to cause a high resistance to heat flow. The present work was to study the problem of heat passage across the contact surface for LHPs and determine those values contact resistance. For two cases of contact structures, the thermal contact resistances were examined experimentally, one being obtained through mechanical contact under pressure and the other through sintered bonding. Nickel powder wick and copper plate were used for specimens. The result showed that a substantial reduction of contact resistance of an order of degree could be obtainable by sintered bonding.

• Transactions of the Korean Society of Mechanical Engineers B
• /
• v.40 no.6
• /
• pp.391-396
• /
• 2016

Wicks play an important role in determining the thermal performance of heat pipes. Foam-type wicks are known to have good potential for enhancing the capillary performance of conventional types of wicks, and this is because of their high porosity and permeability. In this study, we develop an analytic expression for predicting the permeability of a foam-type wick based on extensive numerical work. The proposed correlation is based on the modified Kozeny-Carman's equation, where the Kozeny-Carman coefficient is given as an exponential function of porosity. The proposed correlations are shown to predict the previous experimental results well for an extensive parametric range. The permeability of the foam-type wick is shown to be significantly higher than that of conventional wicks because of their high porosity.

• 유체기계공업학회:학술대회논문집
• /
• 2006.08a
• /
• pp.479-482
• /
• 2006

The most the electronic industry has recently accelerated the modularization, the miniaturization and the high integrated trend of electronics fields such as electronics components, appliances and etc., the most increasingly the heat generation problem rises. Even though the conventional cooling technologies are widely used in order to reduce the heat loads, the technologies are not easy to meet the present trends due to the fact that most of many conventional methods are relative to external form environments such as size, design and so on. With regardless of those environments, however, a heat pipe is one of the most efficient systems to improve the heat transfer performance. And then the performance of the heat pipe depends on a wick structure. Of various wick structures, sintered metal wick is known so that it has some advantages such as smaller pore size, increasing porosity as well as high reliability. In this study sintered metal wicks, thickness 0.7 mm, 0.8 mm and 0.9 mm, were manufactured as of $100{\mu}m$ copper powder to obtain the manufacturing technology of heat pipes mounted with a sintered metal wick. Furthermore, experiments for the operational performance factors such as capillary limit, thermal resistance were not only performed but also compared with a theoretical model simultaneously. Experimental results agreed with the theoretical model, and then it seems to be required to study various development processes of sintered metal wicks for the high performance of a heat pipe system.