Experimental investigations on thermal characteristics of sintered wick heat pipe using cuo and al2o3 nanofluids

Abstract

Enhancement of heat transport capacity is the foremost issue and phase change heat transfer one of the effective technologies used to increase the rate of heat transfer Conduction and convective heat transfer exist but these methods are not much effective and the installation of single phase heat exchanger occupies the large area The aim of the present work is to replace the existing conventional heat exchanging method using the heat pipe The heat carrying capacity of the heat pipes mainly depends on of the working fluid and operating pressure Especially these devices dissipate heat from small areas even millimeter magnitude provision is also enough to function efficiently compared with the other conventional systems like fan cooling and fins The suspension of high thermal conductivity nanoparticles in the working fluid enhances the thermal properties of the working fluid and thus the thermal characteristics of heat pipes This study is planned to carry using CuO/DI water and Al2O3/DI water nanofluid as a working fluid instead of DI water The particles size and morphology majorly affect the properties of nanofluids So the preference is given in the selection of nanoparticles size and morphology as remains constant and its effect on the enhancement of heat transfer to be studied The sintered wick heat pipe outer tube made up of copper having the specifications viz diameter length and thickness of the tube is 12 330 and 1 mm respectively The copper sintered wick structure of 1 mm thickness created the good capillary force for the liquid flow from the condenser to evaporator end The sintered wick is created from the electrolytic copper vi powder of thickness 1mm. The evaporator section is heated using a 300 W capacity perimeter heater for uniform distribution The mass fraction of CuO and Al2O3 nanoparticles are varied from 0 1.5 wt. % with an increment of 0.5% The working fluid is filled inside the heat pipe as 60% of the evaporator volume