Effets de la nature du fluide de travail et de la structure capillaire sur la capacité thermique d'un caloduc.

Heat pipes have applications in several areas of thermal engineering, including electronic components to spacecraft thrust chamber exchangers. Although they can transfer large amounts of heat over a spatially restricted interval, they exhibit several operating limitations. The properties of the working fluid, the capillary structure, the orientation of the pipe, the length and the diameter of the pipe, are parameters that affect these limits. The present study aims to numerically evaluate the heat transfer capacity of a heat pipe. A one-dimensional model is developed considering water, ammonia and sodium as working fluids. The capillary structure is taken to be a wire mesh wick or a square groove, for which several operating thermal ranges are investigated. A comparative study for different properties of heat pipes has been performed using the Matlab® software. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]