Experimental Research on Heat Transfer Characteristics of Pulsating Heat Pipe

Experimental research was conducted to understand heat transfer characteristics of pulsating heat pipe in this paper. The PHP is made of high quality glass capillary tube. The heat transfer rate and many other influence factors, the flow patterns were observed in the start-up, transition and stable stage under different fill ratio. The effects of heating position on heat transfer were discussed. The experimental results indicate that no annular flow appeares in top heating condition. The flow pattern in PHP is transferred form bulk flow to semi-annual flow and annual flow, and the performance of heat transfer is improved for down heating case under different fill ratios and heat transfer rate. The experimental results show that the total heat resistant of PHP is increased with fill ratio, and heat transfer rate achieves optimum at filling rate 50%. But for pulsating heat pipe with changing diameters the thermal resistance is higher than that with uniform diameters.