Investigation on thermal resistance of a novel evaporator wick structure

The perfect performance of a heat pipe or a vapor chamber is not only decided by the excellent structure design, but also closely related to the proper working conditions. In the present work, a novel evaporator wick structure was fabricated through chemical etching. A mathematical model of the thermal resistance was developed. To better understand the influence of the filling quantity of working fluid and the heat source power on the thermal resistance, an experiment was set up to simulate the working conditions of an evaporator. From the comparison between the experimental results and theoretical analysis, it revealed that the heat source power and filling quantity had different impacts on the wick's thermal resistance. As the thermal conduction resistance was relatively low, the total thermal resistance of the evaporator was mainly influenced by the thermal evaporation resistance. The total thermal resistance of the novel evaporator wick structure ranged from 0.13 to 0.19 K/W.