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ARTICLE

Heat and Mass Transfer Characteristics of Alkali Metals in a Combined Wick of High-Temperature Heat Pipe

by Ping Yu, Chuanhui Huang, Lei Liu, Huafeng Guo, Chengqiang Liu

1 College of Mechanical and Electrical Engineering, Xuzhou University of Technology, Xuzhou, China.

* Corresponding Author: Ping Yu. Email: .

(This article belongs to the Special Issue: CFD Modeling and Multiphase Flows)

Fluid Dynamics & Materials Processing 2020, 16(2), 267-280. https://doi.org/10.32604/fdmp.2020.06528

Received 08 March 2019; Accepted 10 June 2019; Issue published 21 April 2020

Abstract

To study the heat and mass transfer characteristics of alkali metals in a combined porous wick in high-temperature heat pipes, a three-dimensional (3-D) numerical model is constructed by using the finite volume method, Darcy’s theory, and the theory of local thermal equilibrium. The research finds that the pressure drop of fluids flowing through a combined porous wick exhibits an increasing trend with increasing flow velocity at the inlet and with decreasing permeability of the porous media; a combined porous wick of lower porosity and permeability and larger fluid velocity at the inlet is found to have a less uniformly distributed fluid velocity; the different temperatures of the fluid at the inlet mainly influence the inlet section of the computational model, while having negligible effect thereon in the axial direction (this embodies the thermal homogeneity of such heat pipes). The result reveals that the temperature change in fluids at the inlet does not significantly affect the overall temperature distribution in a combined wick.

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