NUMERICAL SIMULATION ON PULSATING HEAT PIPE WITH CONNECTED-PATH STRUCTURE

The pulsating heat pipe (PHP) has attracted significant attention due to the increasing demand for heat dissipation. This work proposed a novel structure with connected paths to achieve split-flow of working fluids. The numerical methodology was adopted to further study the effect of physical structures on the heat transfer performance of PHP. At first, the geometric model was established in ANSYS Workbench, and the VoF (Volume of Fluid) model was employed to capture the distribution of the interface of gas and liquid phases. Then, the study numerically investigated the effect of connected-path structure at different inclination angles (30°, 45°, and 60°) on the heat transfer performance using Fluent. The results indicated that for the PHP with a connected-path angle of 45° the heat transfer efficiency per unit heat increased by 193.03%, and the thermal resistance decreased 65.59%. However, the application of connected-path structures with 30° and 60° inclination angles would deteriorate the operational performance of PHP.