Thermosyphone is a kind of heat pipe consisting of a tube which after through degassing has been filled with the required working fluid under vacuum, the pipe is equipped with wide fines on both sides in order to absorb solar radiation, effectively. In order to eliminate conduction and convection heat transfer phenomena the tube is situated inside an evacuated glass bulb. In order to increase the efficiency and improve the design and working conditions of various types of heat pipes, a fundamental knowledge of the variation of operating parameters inside the heat pipes is necessary. In this paper, effective operating parameters of a thermosyphone heat pipe in unifon11 and stead' condition are studied. These parameters include saturation temperature of the fluid inside the pipe, the variation of liquid and vapor flow rates inside the pipe and finally the pressure drop of liquid and vapor along the length of the pipe. The modeling is first started by writing an energy balance for the control volume of the pipe so that a first approximation for the above mentioned parameters is obtained. In this balance, depending on the type of fluid next to the condenser section and the type of heat transfer phenomena (free or forced convection) and also with due regards to the experimental correlations avaliable, first the
Nusselt number and then the heat transfer coefficient is calculated. From the latter, a first estimate of the required values for the liquid and vapor flow rates are found to be 0.222 and 0.0001126 Kg/s, respectively. The thickness of the film was determined to be 0.2 mm. In order to calculate the variations of the above mentioned parameters along the length of the tube, mass heat and momentum balances were written in next step for the control volumes on the liquid film, vapor phase and the system as a whole. Diagrams of these variations were obtained. The results were compared with both the data available in the
literature and the experimental findings of a heat pipe constructed and operated for this purpose. Comparisons between the experimental and theoretical results showed a difference range of + 15 %, which appears to show the suitability of the proposed model.
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