Experimental Investigation Thermal Performance of Loop Heat Pipe Operating with Different Working Fluids

Nowadays, due to the tremendous development of data centers (DCs), studying the effective cooling methods that can face to the challenges such as the high power or heat flux dissipation and the efficient electricity consumption in DCs has never been unnecessary. Loop heat pipe (LHP), a two-phase heat transfer device, is being considered as one of the potential solutions for the above problems. This paper introduces the experimental study on the thermal performances of LHP functioning under gravity assisted condition with different working fluids that are water and ethanol (C2H5OH). This LHP has the flat-rectangular evaporator with the stainless-steel (SS) sintering wick installed inside. The results demonstrate that under the same condenser cooling condition, water LHP performed better than ethanol LHP. In the case of water LHP, when heating power was increased from 33 to 535 W, the temperature at the top surface of the heating block raised from 38C to 110C. With the ethanol LHP, this temperature reached 133C at the heating power of 395 W. If temperature limitation of microprocessors functioning inside the DCs is recognized at 85C, the cooling capabilities of LHP are 220 W and 350 W corresponding to the working fluid are ethanol and water respectively. In addition, the discussions about the difference in boiling heating transfer characteristics as well as condenser performances between water LHP and ethanol LHP are also presented in this study.