Assessment and Prediction of Heat Transfer Performance of Oscillating Heat Pipe using Acetone

Abstract

Heat pipe is a device to enhance the performance of heat transfer, in particular to transition phase change process. The present investigation is carried out to measure the thermal performance of a closed loop acetone filled oscillating heat pipe with four turns is fabricated and tested. The test was carried out for the inner diameter of 1.7 mm copper tube by varying the acetone of 50%, 60%, 70% and 80% filler ratio with a heat input of 15 W to 40 W in steps of 5 W has been considered. The results shows that 80% acetone filled OHP provides the better thermal performance with an average minimum temperature difference between condenser and evaporator by 6.03%, heat transfer coefficient increased by 77% and the thermal resistance decrease by 43% respectively. The mathematical modelling was developed to predict the performance of the heat transfer. The model clearly shows that the independent variables are statistically significant with a p-value of 0.05 and the uncertainty analysis between the experimental and predicted values are less than 10%.