Design and development of heat pipe heat exchangers

• Main Author: Shrivastava, Mohit
• Other Authors: Alta Knizley
• Format: Others
• Language: en
• Published: MSSTATE 2019
• Subjects: Mechanical Engineering
• Online Access: http://sun.library.msstate.edu/ETD-db/theses/available/etd-03042019-142742/

Heat pipe is a passive heat transport device, engineered to harness latent heat of vaporization of contained working fluid to efficiently transfer sensible energy of one fluid stream to another. Heat pipes have observed applications in HVAC, electronics cooling, space equipment cooling, etc. due to their high effective thermal conductivity. Heat pipe heat exchanger (HPHE) employs finned heat pipes for performance enhancement. A mathematical model was developed into a Mathcad based tool for properly sizing and optimizing gravity-assisted HPHE designs. A charging station was setup to fabricate heat pipes under deep vacuum using a liquid nitrogen cold trap. A wind test tunnel was constructed to conduct experiments on a HPHE prototype. The thermal performance testing resulted in 11.4 kW of heat duty with 54% effectiveness of the HPHE. Parametric studies were also conducted for varying input heat and air flow rates, followed by the result comparison with program predictions.