COOLING PERFORMANCE OF MICRO HEAT PIPE USED FOR MOBILE ELECTRONIC DEVICES

The paper presents experimental results of cooling performance of micro heat pipe using infra-red Thermography (IRT) technique for mobile electronic devices and validates those results by using commercial software ANSYS Fluent 16.1 in which 3-D numerical model is developed and solved by Volume of Fluid (VOF) model. The computational simulation is performed at constant heat flux applied to the evaporator section and convective boundary condition at condenser end. The experimental measurements were conducted on micro heat pipe using distilled water (DW) and Al2O3/water Nano-fluids. The set of experiments were performed to measure the surface temperature of the micro heat pipe (MHP) by varying cooling fan voltages i.e. 2V, 4V, and 6V. The effective thermal conductivity, thermal resistance and effectiveness for both phases along the length of micro heat pipe were calculated. It was observed that the use of Nano-fluid reduces 5-10 oC surface temperature of MHP as compared to DW, hence use of Nano-fluid as a coolant in MHP improves the thermal performance and reliability of such devices.