Numerical Simulation of Variable Conductance Heat Pipe with Cold Reservoir by Single Phase Flow Approach

The heat pipes are usually simulated by using a two phase model and a model describing the phase-change process. The computational costs of the two-phase approaches are relatively high and the model generally needs small-size time steps, which leads to a long simulation run times in the order of several days. In the present study, a variable conductance heat pipe is simulated by using a set of single-phase fluid flow models. It is shown that the proposed approach needs to a simulation time in the order of minutes that considerably facilitates the parametric study process of the variable conductance heat pipe. The effect of heat rate, sink temperature, mass of non-condensable gas, vapor radius, and wick porosity on the performance of variable conductance heat pipe are investigated. For the considered variable conductance heat pipe, the obtained numerical results indicate that sink temperature has the greatest effect on distributions of average wall temperature, overall heat transfer coefficient, the active length of condenser, and its average temperature. By increasing the sink temperature of 10, the active length of condenser is increased about 48 and average wall temperature is increased about 6.4.