Heat Pipe with Accurate Liquid and Gas Properties

Application ID: 90311


Heat pipes are designed to transfer heat efficiently through vaporization, mass transfer, and condensation of a working fluid. They are found in a wide variety of applications where thermal control is of importance, with cooling of electronics being a prominent example.

Inside a heat pipe, the temperature difference between the hot and cold sides together with the temperature dependence of the vapor pressure, induce a pressure difference across the vapor chamber. The pressure difference, in turn, drives the vapor from the hot to the cold side. The vaporization acts as a heat sink at the vapor–wick interface at the hot side, and conversely, the condensation as a heat source, at the cold side. This model demonstrates how the laminar flow in the vapor chamber of the heat pipe can be coupled to the liquid phase transport through the porous wick, and how thermodynamic properties of water can be obtained from the database in the Liquid & Gas Properties module. The importance of vapor transport is compared to the conductive heat transfer in the pipe wall. The former dominates the latter by several orders of magnitude.

This model example illustrates applications of this type that would nominally be built using the following products: