A Capillary-Wick Heat Pipe Fabricated on a Plastic Board (Fundamental Experiments on Heat Transport Characteristics)

A capillary-wick heat pipe having the dimensions of 5.0 mm × 5.0 mm × 100 mm (length) is fabricated on a surface of a plastic board, and the experimental investigations are conducted on the operational characteristics of the heat pipe. Plastics are easy to manufacturing, lightweight, low cost, flexible, and besides, the present study aims at the phase-change heat transfer inside the plastic board. A sintered copper powder and water are used as the wick structure and the working fluid of the heat pipe, respectively. In experiments, an evaporator section of the heat pipe is heated by a heater while a condenser section is water-cooled by a heat sink. A heat input and a liquid volume inside the heat pipe are changed, and the temperature distribution of the heat pipe is measured by thermocouples. Moreover, a one-dimensional thermal circuit model is made to evaluate the effective thermal conductivity of the heat pipe. From the experimental results, the continuous phase-change heat transfer inside the plastic board and its effectiveness are confirmed. It is also revealed that the effective thermal conductivity of the heat pipe is 854 W/(m·K) in maximum under the present experimental conditions.