Investigation and Characterization of Heat Pipe using Enhanced Surfaces

Abstract

During the last two decades and more, the component density on integrated circuits has grown from about six thousand transistors on the microprocessor to over five million transistors on a similar-sized microprocessor. The increased power and component densities on these integrated circuits necessitated the development of innovative cooling methods. For the same, heat pipes are extensively used as heat transmission device because of the advantages like constructional simplicity, exceptional flexibility, accessibility to control and an ability to transport heat with small temperature drop without requiring any external pumping work. The miniature heat pipes (MHPs) appear promising for use in microelectronics cooling.

In the present study, an experimental study is carried out to understand the heat transfer performance of Miniature Heat Pipes (length = 200mm and diameter = 8mm) which can be applied for cooling solution of electronics equipment such as the computer CPU, etc. The screen meshed copper heat pipe is studied for various orientations and various performance parameters like effective thermal resistance, effective thermal conductivity, heat transfer coefficients and efficiency. Further the calculation of various parameters of mesh and heat transfer limitations of heat pipe are evaluated theoretically. The effect of heat pipe orientation on the thermal performance was experimentally determined. It was observed that the orientation of heat pipe at 45(gravity assisted-condenser oriented upwards) performed most efficiently and the average improvement was 25.19 % with respect to the horizontal position of heat pipe.