Enhancement in the Capillary Performance of Aluminum Groove through Laser Textured Deposition

Groove is widely used in the wicks of heat pipes. In this paper, a laser texture deposition (LTD) process was proposed to texture deposit SiO2 in rectangular aluminum groove. Both the SEM and XPS analysis revealed that a fluffy SiO2 layer was deposited on the surface of alumina fluff, which increased the fluff density. Statistically, the density of fluff on the surface of LTD was 1.12 times higher than that on the laser texture (LT) surface, leading to an increase in porosity and decrease in effective capillary radius. This significantly improved the capillary performance of the LTD groove. The results showed that, compared to the Raw and LTD grooves, the increase in height of the LTD groove was enhanced by 2.42 and 1.07 times, respectively, in 5 s, while the capillary performance factor (M) was increased by 2.83 and 1.04 times, respectively, in 1 s. This study introduces a novel process for enhancing the capillary performance of aluminum groove.