Performance effects of heat transfer and geometry on heat pipe thermal modules under forced convection

The geometry and heat transfer effects on heat pipes embedded heat sinks-cooling system are investigated in the present paper. In the forced convection system, two different heat pipe geometrical shapes of L and U configurations are taken into account. This study adopts a versatile superposition method and least-square estimators with thermal resistance network analysis to design and experiment their geometry and heat transfer effects under different fan speeds and heat source areas. The results suggest that the characteristics of system performance under varying speeds and areas are significantly different from those under altering speeds and areas. When the thermal performances of these two configurations are 0.04 °C/W of U-shaped heat pipes at 78.85 W, and L-shaped heat pipes are lowest 1.04 °C/W at 34 W, respectively, the lowest thermal resistances of the representative L- and U-shaped heat pipe–heat sink thermal modules are respectively 0.25 °C/W and 0.17 °C/W under twin fans of 3000 RPM and 30 × 30 mm2 heat sources. The result of this work is a useful thermal management method to facilitate rapid analysis and has provided a useful insight into the design of heat pipe cooling systems.