Comparison of Vacuum Chamber Tested Biporous Wicks With Thermal Ground Plane Testing

Abstract

Investigation of bi-porous wicks has yielded an effective method for increasing surface heat transfer when the heat flux is high. It was further found that addition of a mono-porous layer on the heated surface significantly reduced the heated wall surface temperature. These bi-layer wicks were designed for use in 3″×5″ heat spreading devices called Thermal Ground Planes (TGP) in order to transfer heat from a 1 cm2 source. In this work we will investigate the performance of a biporous wick with a monoporous layer in various test set-ups to show the versatility of this heat pipe-substrate. Tests were performed at UCLA and at Advanced Cooling Technologies (ACT) to investigate the wick. Experiments at UCLA were conducted in a vacuum chamber setup to isolate the performance of the wick whereas at ACT the wick lined the evaporator side of a TGP. In order to more closely simulate the operating conditions in a TGP and characterize the vapor spacing parameter, some tests at UCLA were performed with a restrictor plate above the wick similar to the space above the wick in the TGP. The data collected using both these experiments showed similar trends of performance as a function of the spacing above the wick. The motivation of this paper is then to validate that the two testing methods provide similar results while independently addressing different parameters.