Praveen Dhanalakota
Department of Mechanical Engineering, Indian Institute of Technology Madras, Chennai-600036, India
Laxman Kumar Malla
Department of Mechanical Engineering, Indian Institute of Technology Madras, Chennai-600036, India
Pallab Sinha Mahapatra
Department of Mechanical Engineering, Indian Institute of Technology Madras, Chennai-600036, India
Arvind Pattamatta
Heat Transfer and Thermal Power Laboratory, Department of Mechanical Engineering, Indian Institute of Technology Madras, Chennai 600036, Tamil Nadu, India
In the present work, the thermal performance of a compact
two-phase flat thermosyphon is investigated numerically. A
two-dimensional computational fluid dynamics model based on
the volume of fluid method and Lee model is employed to
investigate the heat transfer characteristics of a two-phase flat thermosyphon. The liquid-vapor interface is tracked using the volume of fluid approach, and the Lee model is used to model liquid-vapor phase change heat transfer. The numerical model is validated with the experimental results. The thermal
performance of a flat copper thermosyphon with water as a
working fluid is tested at a 53% filling ratio. The flat
thermosyphon's total thermal resistance is 0.39 to 0.31 K/W for
heat fluxes of 10 - 40 W/cm2. The spreading resistance is around 0.13 K/W, and a uniform temperature on the condenser surface is obtained. The flat thermosyphon distributed heat flux uniformly by spreading the heat through conduction and liquidvapor phase change. It is observed that the flat thermosyphon can be used as an effective heat spreader to mitigate the hotspots and improve the heat sink performance.