Search

Axially grooved heat pipes are the devices mainly used to dissipate the heat flow aris-ing due to latent heat of fluid phase change at the state of saturation. Part of theheat injected at the evaporator flows through a microregion where a meniscus re-mains hung at the top of each groove. This paper presents a 1D steady-state modelconstructed to study the heat and mass transfers in this zone. It allows one to showan important result concerning the respective behavior of the meniscus in the mi-croregion and in the macroscopic one. Then, the paper compares the performances ofvarious metal/fluid couples relative to the flux evacuated through the microregion andcontact angle. Thus, the present study completes the characterization of the microre-gion and will directly participate in the heat pipe design improvement.