Effect of electric field on the enhanced heat transfer characteristic of an evaporator with multilayered sintered copper mesh

• Electric field strength can enhance the heat transfer coefficients.
• For different working fluid the heat transfer enhanced effect is different.
• Heat transfer enhancement effect is more prominent at higher heat flux density region.

In this paper, it was investigated experimentally that the effect of different kinds of working fluid on the thermal performance of evaporator with capillary wick consisted by multilayered sintered copper mesh under different electric field strengths at the operating pressure of 1.01 × 105 Pa R141b and R123 were used as the working fluids. The electric field strength in this study was in the range of 0kV/m–1600 kV/m, respectively. The experimental results showed that the applied electric field strength has significant effect on heat transfer characteristic. The heat transfer enhancement effects increased with the increase of the electric field. Under the applied electric field strength, the maximum heat transfer enhancement factors could reach as high as 1.5 and 1.32 for the two kinds of working fluids in the experiment.