Desenvolvimento de tubos de calor com microranhuras fabricadas por eletroerosão a fio

Abstract

In this master's dissertation an alternative fabrication method (wire electrical discharge machining, or wire EDM) was used to manufacture axial microgrooves in heat pipes. With this, material has been removed rather than being added to the heat pipe shell for the design of the capillary structure, contributing to mass reduction in the passive heat transfer device by phase change. A model based on thermal design and operational limits (capillary, trailing, viscous, sonic and boiling limits) was proposed for the heat pipes with axial microstrips of semicircular geometry as capillary structure considering different definitions available in the literature. These models, implemented in the EEStm (Engineering Equation Solver) software, were used as a tool for the design of the proposed grooved heat pipes. The heat pipes were produced from a straight copper tube with an outside diameter of 9.45 mm, an inner diameter of 6.20 mm and a total compliance of 200 mm. The working fluid used was deionized water and the tubes and heat were charged with a fill ratio of 60% of the evaporator volume. The condenser was cooled by forced convection of air, the adiabatic section was insulated by a fiberglass tape and the evaporator was heated using an electric resistor in nickel-chromium alloy tape and isolated from the external environment by an aeronautical thermal insulation. The heat pipes were experimentally tested for slopes of operations equal to 0º, 45º, 90º, 225º and 270º with respect to the horizontal plane, under thermal loads between 5 W and 50 W. The experimental results showed that the axial grooves manufactured by the Wire-EDM process worked satisfactorily in all analyzed cases. In most of the cases, the heat pipe with grooves showed a better performance when compared with the heat pipe with metallic mesh.