Advanced design of a low cost loop heat pipe and comparison with a novel numerical approach

An advanced method for LHP evaporator wick manufacturing is suggested. A smallscale loop heat pipe (LHP) with an innovative nickel wick has been fabricated in Minsk, at the Luikov Institute, and tested to examine its thermal performances. The 'low-cost' characteristic is given by the reduction of operations which are needed for the LHP wick fabrication. The present paper demonstrates that the novel evaporator wick is still presenting very high performances. A numerical approach based on electrical analogy (lumped method) for steady and unsteady mode has also been developed using a C++ environment. The unsteady code represents the main novelty about the loop heat pipe modeling as the standard lumped technique has been coupled with the distributed one: for the accurate description of local phenomena, the full partial differential equations scheme are considered and solved by means of the finite volume method. The global model has been then simulated and the results have been compared with the experimental data. The model simulates reasonably well the transient response of the LHP. A more accurate evaporator scheme is required to take advantage of all the capabilities of this new approach.