Experimental and theoretical investigation of the influence of heat transfer rate on the thermal performance of a multi-channel flat heat pipe

Recently, flat heat pipes have been proposed for surface cooling applications to passively extract and recover thermal energy from hot surfaces. For instance, flat heat pipes have recently been proposed as thermal absorber for photovoltaic/thermal (PV/T) applications or for the thermal management of batteries. Following promising surface cooling results, increasing the fundamental knowledge of the two-phase heat transfer taking place inside such multi-channel flat heat pipes can participate to its widespread and lead to further improvement of the technology. Indeed, until now, the investigations have focused on the application only and not on the performance of the flat heat pipe itself. In this regard, this manuscript experimentally and theoretically investigates the thermal performance of a multi-channel flat heat pipe used for surface cooling applications. Heat transfer rates in the range 0–1500 W are studied and their impact on the boiling, condensation, and total thermal resistance of the multi-channel flat heat pipe is measured. In order to predict the thermal performance of the multi-channel flat heat pipe at all heat transfer rates, a theoretical model is proposed, which considers the impact of the multi-channel geometry. This model uses a multi-channel thermal resistance network. Furthermore, an important number of two-phase correlations for pool boiling and condensation are compared with experimental data and the optimum equations are integrated into the multi-channel model. As a result, over the whole range of heat transfer rates investigated, the proposed multi-channel flat heat pipe model was able to predict the boiling, condensation, and total thermal resistances of the heat pipe with an average error of 17.2%, 14.4% and 13.1%, respectively. Finally, the impact of the tilt angle is also studied, and infrared imaging of the flat heat pipe surface is presented.