Miniature Loop Heat Pipe with Multiple Evaporators and Multiple Condensers

Loop Heat Pipe (LHP) is a high performance heat transport device using capillary forces to circulate the working fluid in a closed loop. Conventional LHPs usually have one capillary pump (evaporator) to acquire waste heat from a heat source. Recent efforts have focused the development of LHPs that contain two or more evaporators. Even though two-evaporator LHPs performed very well, the volume of each compensation chamber (CC) became much larger than that of the single-evaporator counterpart. The reason was that all but one CC would be liquid-filled during normal operation. The one that was not liquid-filled had to be large enough to accommodate the system liquid expansion at maximum temperature. As a result, LHPs with more than 3 evaporators were not feasible for practical applications simply because the CCs became prohibitively large. In the current research, the CCs of a multiple-evaporator LHP were capillarily-linked. In other words, the CCs always contained a mixture of liquid and vapor (two-phase), allowing the loop to operate with a much smaller fluid charge. Consequently the required CC volume was also reduced.