Book Description

Rotating and revolving heat pipes have been used in a variety of applications including heat pipe heat exchangers, cooling of rotating electrical machines, and heat removal in high speed cutting operations. The use of heat pipes in rotating environments has prompted many analytical, numerical, and experimental investigations of the heat transfer characteristics of these devices. Past investigations, however, have been restricted to the study of straight heat pipes. In this work, a curved rotating heat pipe is studied numerically and experimentally. In certain types of rotating machines, heat generating components, which must be cooled during normal operation, are located at some radial distance from the axis of rotation. The bent heat pipe studied here is shown to have advantages when compared to the conventional straight heat pipes in these off-axis cooling scenarios. The heat pipe studied here is built so that both the condenser and evaporator sections are parallel to the axis of rotation. The condenser section is concentric with the axis of rotation while the evaporator section can be placed in contact with off-axis heat sources in the rotating machine. The geometry is achieved by incorporating an S-shaped curve between the on-axis rotating condenser section and the off-axis revolving evaporator section. Furthermore, the heat pipe uses an annular gap wick structure. Incorporating an annular gap wick structure into the heat pipe allows for operation in a non-rotating environment. A numerical model of this rotating heat pipe is developed. The analysis is based on a two-dimensional finite-difference model of the liquid flow coupled to a one-dimensional model of the vapor flow. Although the numerical model incorporates many significant aspects of the fluid flow, the flow in the actual heat pipe is expected to be threedimensional. The rotating heat pipe with the S-shaped curve is also studied experimentally to determine how well the numerical model captures the key aspects of the fluid flow and heat transfer.