International Journal of Research and Innovation on Science, Engineering and Technology (IJRISET)

International Journal of Research and Innovation in

Thermal Engineering (IJRITE)
CFD ANALYSIS ON PULSATING HEAT PIPE TO
IMPROVE HEAT TRANSFER
Akella Yeswanth1,T.S.S.Bhaskara Rao2.
1 Research Scholar, Department of Mechanical Engineering, Aditya College of Engineering & Technology,Surampalem, Andhra Pradesh,
India.
2 Assistant Professor, Department of Mechanical Engineering, Aditya College of Engineering & Technology,Surampalem, Andhra
Pradesh, India.

Abstract
Pulsating Heat Pipes (PHP) are a passive heat transfer device and do not require a pump or additional power to operate.
Heat transfer is through natural oscillations of the working fluid between the evaporator and condenser sections. There
are so many factors which are governing the heat transfer that is happening thru this PHPs such as Geometry design,
Working fluid selection, Filling ratio etc.,
This paper mainly focuses on improving the heat transfer capability in a single loop closed OHP to vary the geometry
by modifying the surface area in the condenser side so as to enhance the heat transfer thru the condenser side and to
avoid the drying out concern in the evaporator and finding the best geometry which yields better results than single loop
PHPs that are using now-a-days.
*Corresponding Author:
Akella Yeswanth,
Research Scholar,Department of Mechanical Engineering, Aditya College of Engineering &
Technology,Surampalem,
Andhra Pradesh, India.
Email: yeswanthakella@gmail.com
Year of publication: 2016
Review Type: peer reviewed
Volume: III, Issue : I
Citation: Akella Yeswanth, Research Scholar "Cfd Analysis on Pulsating Heat Pipe To Improve Heat Transfer
" International Journal of Research and Innovation in
Thermal Engineering (IJRITE) 3.1,(2016) :107-111

INTRODUCTION:
A Pulsating or oscillating heat pipe was first introduced
by Mr. Akachi in 1990. It is a meandering tube, which
consist of serpentine channel of having a capillary dimension. Generally this is a promising heat transfer device in
present heat pipe family and which transfers large quantities of heat from evaporator to condenser with phase
change phenomena.

by latent heat of the vapor and by sensible heat, which

is transported by help of liquid oscillations in the tube
because of the phase changing phenomena.
An attempt has been made to change the geometry in
the condenser part of the heat pipe and evaluating the
heat transfer performance by comparing the experimental
analysis with the CFD research.
TYPES OF SINGLE LOOP PHP:
There are 2 types of pulsating heat pipes.
Closed loop pulsating heat pipe
Open loop pulsating heat pipe
Closed loop PHP will be going to perform better than open
loop devices because of fluid circulation that is superposed upon the oscillations within the loop. By using the
check valve within the loop, the performance of the closed
loop heat pipe is further improved. The installation of
the check valve is very difficult and costly because of the
small nature of the device. So, the closed loop pulsating
heat pipe without a check valve is mostly used.
PRINCIPLE OF CLOSED LOOP PHP:

This pipe is initiallyevacuated and then partly filled with

the working fluid. The Effect of surface tension causes the
formation of the liquid slugs that are interspersed with
the vapor slug. When the heat applied to the evaporation section, then the working fluid that is filled inside
the pipe begins to evaporate. This leads to increase in the
vapor pressure in the tube, causing the bubble to grow in
the evaporator zone, pushing the fluid towards the condenser. When the vapor passes through the condenser
the vapour pressure decreases and the bubble condensation starts. This procedure between evaporator section
and the condenser section is continuous and results in
the oscillating movement within tube. Heat is transferred
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International Journal of Research and Innovation on Science, Engineering and Technology (IJRISET)

A single turn heat pipe can be employed because there

will be less loss of pressure during U bends. One side of
the heat pipe is connected to the heating element where
the bundle of water flow through the pipe receives heat
and due to the thermal excitation and phase change phenomena water will be converted in to water vapour and
vapour passes through the hollow pipe and carries the
heat to the condenser through the adiabatic section. At
the condenser the water vapour there by dissipating heat
and converts in to water thus due to the gravity the water
again flows back to the evaporator.

focusses on material science, packaging industry and

fabrication industry for better cooling strategies. Later on
my research mainly focussed on Pulsating heat pipes and
their performance, especially to gain satisfactory results
from their usage. In the last decade the trials on PHPs
are successful enough in exploring better outputs but
few operational phenomena are still unclear and leads to
future opportunities to continue the research for further
outputs. However with developments achieved so far, the
prospects for this unprecedented technology seem quite
promising.

FACTORS EFFECTING RATE OF HEAT TRANSFER IN

PHP:

Modern trends in the thermal management of the electronics are very demanding and the limits are being focused in every aspect of design.

1. Number of turns To enhance the performance for

heat pipe, the number of turns must be increased and
spatial orientation must be improved to reduce pressure
loss during bents.

Presently Market requirements include:

(a) Thermal resistance from chip to heat sink < 1 K/W,

2. Filling ratio This can be defined as fraction by volume of the total volume of heat pipe which is initially filled
with the liquid. The optimal fill ratio is described when
the maximum heat transfer rate is achieved for a particular heat pipe.

(b) High heat transport capability up to 250 W,

3. Effect of the size of the evaporator /Condenser section Generally equal Evaporator and condensers are
selected for heat pipes. But, to avoid evaporator dry out,
the condenser area should be greater than evaporator.
Evaporator and condenser sizes must be designed for the
particular application of usage.

(e) Long term reliability,

4. Inclination angle The angle of tilt that must be

maintained to get maximum heat transfer is considered
to be the best inclination angle for heat pipe.
5. Working fluid - The best working fluid is the one which
possess better working conditions as explained and listed
below. Generally the working fluid should support a operating temperature ranging between 500C to 1500C.
When we would like to select a working fluid that should
possess the following characteristics:
Thermal stability
Wettability
Reasonable vapour pressure.
High thermal conductivity & latent heat
Low liquid and vapour viscosities
Reasonable surface tension property
Compatability with the Oscillating heat pipe material
Appreciable freezing points,
6. Tube/channel cross sectional diameter The diameter of the heat pipe depends on Bond number. The formula is shown below:

LITERATURE SURVEY:
In the recent times thermal management of the electronics is a serious task that one must focus more on the
advancements in the technology. The heat generated from
electronics are high enough during their usual operation
which gives us a tough task for improving the thermal
performance of the electronics. This technology mainly

(c) Heat flux spreading up to 60 W/cm2,

(d) Mechanical and thermal compatibility,

(f) Miniaturization, and

(g) Low cost.
These above said demands pose a real-time challenge of
managing increased fluxes and power levels. With such
conditions in mind, better cooling and heat transfer strategies are going to ask continuously that is the development of jet impingement and pool boiling are are the
phase changing techniques and recently micro and mini
channel flow boiling concepts are prominent to study because the electronics goods are decreasing the size and
projecting better performance than before. Thus challenging the thermal management for better performances.
Pulsating heat pipe is a pipe which is closed at both ends
that is both the ends are connected one to another and
one side of the pipe is evaporator side and opposite side
will be condenser side. In between the evaporator and
condenser, there will be adiabatic section which acts a
transfer of heat from evaporator to condenser.
The liquid that is being injected inside the pipe will be
uncontrolled, natural, asymmetric liquid-vapour plugs
which moves inside the pipe and acts as a transporter of
heat. The surface tension, capillarity and phase change
phenomena are the main things that enhances the behaviour of fluid to act as a thermo syphon.

equivalent heat pipe or thermo syphon systems are better
than CLPHPs as they are based on pure latent heat transfer. But when compared with array of equivalent metallic
fins, weight becomes an advantage. Finally, reliability is
the another advantage due to the absence of an external
mechanical pump.
Thus, these models which are available do not represent
actually the thermo-hydrodynamics completely of PHPs.
Thus CLPHPs Modelling will continue to pose new challenges.So, it might be concluded as the work to be done
on CLPHPs, here based on ANSYS FLUENT 15.0 can contribute to face this challenge.

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International Journal of Research and Innovation on Science, Engineering and Technology (IJRISET)

CFD ANALYSIS FOR EXPERIMENTAL GEOMETRY:

Geometry design:
Heat pipe thermal performance can be enhanced by
changing any of the techniques such as by changing the
number of turns, filling ratio and geometry of the heat
pipe. Presently during this study the analysis does not
concentrates on filling ratio as so many researches are
under process. The working fluid can be taken as methanol, Water, Ethanol etc., but as discussed above water is
better fluid which can possess better results than other
fluids. Hence water and water vapour are working fluids
that are considered for study.
Coming to the change of geometry, generally Evaporator
and condenser are taking as a equal sized. This has a
drawback of evaporator dry out. To avoid that the attempt
has been made in this research for considering the geometry of having higher area in the condenser side than
in the Evaporator side of the heat pipe. This changes are
reflected without any change in the length and width of
the heat pipe. Hence, the space occupied by the heat pipe
does not change but the performance will be improved according to my view point.
The modified geometry is shown below.

In the Solution methods tabScheme is taken as SIMPLE

and by using least squares cell based method was taken
for analysis. Momentum was default set as Second order
upwind and select the suitable values in the CFD analysis.
Finally Solutions are initialized with the given values and
by obtaining number of iterations based on the time thru
this transient conditions.
EXPERIMENTAL Vs CFD RESULTS:
SOURCE

EVAPORATOR

Time

Te
EXP

Sec

Te
CFD
0

CONDENSER
Re

Te
EXP

Te
CFD
0

Re
%

200

40

22

-45.00

29

13

-55.17

400

42

38

-9.52

30

28

-6.67

600

41

53

29.27

30

41

36.67

800

42

65

54.76

29.5

53

79.66

Average relative error (%)

7.38

13.62

COMPARISON OF CFD & EXPERIMENTAL RESULTS 8 W

8 WATTS POWER INPUT

SECTION

TEXP

TCFD

RE

EVAPORATOR

41.25

44.55

CONDENSER

29.65

33.75

13.83

AVERAGE TEMP. CFD Vs EXPERIMENTAL RESULTS

MESHING: Meshing was done on the above geometry with

edge sizing. In the Edge size option the number of divisions was given with the specified values and cells are
divided to the number of Quadrilateral cells with 9645
nodes and 8055 cells of equal cells and Evaporator, Condenser and adiabatic section was named from the geometry with Named selection option.
SET-UP PLATFORM:
In the General tab Pressure based solver was taken as
basic type because the density of the total fluid flow inside
the channel is taken as constant. Transient analysis is
carried out as the flow varies with time.
In the Models tabMulti phase Volume of fluid (VOF) model
was taken as the phase changing simulation can only be
done thru this option, Energy is switched ON and flow
takes place. Viscous model is taken as k-epsilon.
In the Materials tab Fluid is taken as water and water
vapour as primary and secondary phases and copper is
taken as material for the analysis.
In the Boundary conditions tab Evaporator was given
heat flux obtaining from the heat input at 8 watts power.
Adiabatic section was given as 0 W/m2 as the heat flow in
and out will not be there. In the Condenser section heat
transfer coefficient was taken as specified value set for
copper material by using convective thermal condition.
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International Journal of Research and Innovation on Science, Engineering and Technology (IJRISET)
SOURCE

EVAPORATOR

Time

CFD 1

Sec

200

CFD
2

CONDENSER
Temp
Diff

23

22

400

39

35

600

52

46

800

65

54

CFD 1

Temp
Diff

14

12

28

24

41

33

11

54

41

13

CFD 2

Comparing CFD simulations (OLD Vs NEW GEOMETRY)

By comparing the values from the Experimental data obtained from the Base journal and CFD analysis on the
same geometry gave a clear conclusion that the CFD analysis results are near to the experimental results.
So, after applying the same CFD analysis on Geometry
1 (Rectangular section at Condenser side) and that is
compared with theGeometry 2 (Serpentine structure at
Condenser side)gave a clear conclusion that Average heat
transfer enhancement of 50 on in the Evaporator section
and 70 in the condenser section. This is because as the
fluid inside the condenser passes through number of
bends and thereby the fluid spends more time at condenser. Hence, that enhances the heat transfer to the
condenser.
CFD RESULTS WITH MODIFIED GEOMETRY

RESULTS & CONCLUSION:

CFD geometry comparison

Experimental - Evaporator Temp. Vs Condenser Temp.

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oscillating heat pipe, Experimental Thermal and Fluid

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AUTHORS

6) Naik, Rudra, et al. "Experimental investigation and performance evaluation of a closed loop pulsating heat pipe."
Journal of Applied Fluid Mechanics 6.2 (2013): 267-275.
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8) Shafii, M. B., et al. "Experimental investigation of
pulsating heat pipes and a proposed correlation." Heat
Transfer Engineering 31.10 (2010): 854-861.

Akella Yeswanth,
Research Scholar,
Department of Mechanical Engineering,
Aditya College of Engineering & Technology,
Surampalem, Andhra Pradesh, India.

9) Clement, Jason, and Xia Wang. "Experimental investigation of pulsat-ing heat pipe performance with regard to
fuel cell cooling applica-tion." Applied Thermal Engineering 50.1 (2013): 268-274.
10) Pachghare, Pramod R., and Ashish M. Mahalle. "Effect of pure and binary fluids on closed loop pulsating
heat pipe thermal perfor-mance." Procedia Engineering
51 (2013): 624-629.
11) Naik, Rudra, et al. "Experimental investigation and
performance evaluation of a closed loop pulsating heat
pipe." Journal of Applied Fluid Mechanics 6.2 (2013):
267-275.

T.S.S.Bhaskara Rao,
Assistant Professor,
Department of Mechanical Engineering,
Aditya College of Engineering & Technology,
Surampalem, Andhra Pradesh, India.

12) Rudresha, S., and Vijee Kumar. "CFD Analysis and

Experimental Investigation on Thermal Performance of
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June-2016: 238-244
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