Fabrication and thermal performance of grooved-sintered wick heat pipe

JIANG Le-lun(蒋乐伦)¹, TANG Yong(汤勇)², WU Hui-yue(武汇岳)³, ZHOU Wei(周伟)¹, JIANG Lin-zhen(蒋琳珍)⁴

(1. School of Engineering, Sun Yat-sen University, Guangzhou 510006, China;
2. Key Laboratory of Surface Functional Structure Manufacturing of Guangdong Higher Education Institutes
(South China University of Technology), Guangzhou 510640, China;
3. School of Communication and Design, Sun Yat-sen University, Guangzhou 510006, China;
4. School of Foreign Studies, Yiwu Industrial and Commercial College, Yiwu 322000, China)

Abstract:Some novel grooved-sintered composite wick heat pipes (GSHP) were developed for the electronic device cooling. The grooved-sintered wicks of GSHP were fabricated by the processes of oil-filled high-speed spin forming and solid state sintering. The wick could be divided into two parts for liquid capillary pumping flow: groove sintered zone and uniform sintered zone. Both of the thermal resistance network model and the maximum heat transfer capability model of GSHP were built. Compared with the theoretical values, the heat transfer limit and thermal resistance of GSHP were measured from three aspects: copper powder size, wick thickness and number of micro grooves. The results show that the wick thickness has the greatest effect on the thermal resistance of GSHP while the copper powder size has the most important influence on the heat transfer limit. Given certain copper powder size and wick thickness, the thermal resistance of GSHP can be the lowest when micro-groove number is about 55.

Key words:wick; heat pipe; electronics cooling; thermal resistance; heat transfer limit