Numerical Investigation of Wickless Heat Pipe Thermal Performance

Abstract

Heat pipe technology has seen a surge in popularity recently for energy savings and heat recovery in a variety of technological applications. Heat pipes are becoming increasingly significant in a variety of industrial applications, particularly in terms of reducing energy consumption in commercial applications and enhancing heat exchanger thermal performance. The impact of fill ratio (liquid volume/evaporator volume) and power inputs on its thermal performances with regard to temperature profile as well as thermal resistance along the wickless heat pipe is investigated in the present study using new Computational Fluid Dynamic (CFD) simulation regarding 2-phase flow within vertical wickless heat pipe. As a working fluid, distilled water has been employed. Ansys Fluent 2019 R3 Code is used for solving the governing equations related to continuity, momentum and energy numerically. A number of the aspects are affecting vertical wickless heat pipe operation, like the heat input, fill ratio, and so on. The effects of heat input on temperature profile distributions on the thermal resistance, pipe wall, and overall performance related to the heat pipe in a vertical orientation were numerically investigated. In all situations, there was a good agreement that has been observed between numerical CFD and the experimental data which is recorded via the researcher, with a slight degree of deviation for thermal performance and temperature profile distribution. Many different filling ratio and heat input values have been researched for enabling the drawing reasonable conclusions. The evaporator temperature increased significantly when the power input was high and fill ratio has been low. The effects of fill ratio become of a higher significance when heat input increases.