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A two-phase capillary evaporator has been enhanced using Electrohydrodynamic (EHD) forces. The evaporator was experimentally investigated under dc applied electric field operating modes as well as without an applied electric field. The results without the applied EHD forces show that the induced flow increases with increasing applied heat loads until a dry out condition is reached. The applied dc voltage electric field provides flow enhancements as high as 200%. A slight polarity effect was observed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

An investigation was performed to examine the effect that the pore size in a porous plate had on the heat transfer between a heated finned surface and a saturated porous plate at different gap distances between the surfaces. Experiments were performed for a porous plate with a nominal pore size of 50 μm and the results were compared with previous results for a pore size of 200 μm (Schertzer et al., 2006, "The Effect of Gap Distance on the Heat Transfer Performance Between a Finned Surface and a Saturated Porous Plate," Int. J. Heat. Mass Transfer, 4, pp. 4200-4208). The plate with the smaller pore size performed better at small and intermediate gaps but not at large gaps. The maximum heat transfer coefficient was similar for both plates when compared in terms of the ratio between the gap distance and the pore size. However, the temperature distributions on the heated foil and their evolution with heat flux were dissimilar when compared in terms of the gap distance or the gap to pore ratio, suggesting that the boiling dynamics within the gap does not scale with either parameters. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]