Effect of Fin and Insert on the Performance Characteristics of Open Loop Pulsating Heat Pipe (OLPHP)

The pulsating heat pipe, a serpentine tube of capillary dimension with many turns, has great impact on today's successful thermal management. It is an ascending technology to satisfy present requirement of increasing thermal performance. Focusing on this, an experiment has been done on the open loop pulsating heat pipes (OLPHP) to observe their performance characteristics by using two types of working fluid by varying inclination angles. The experiment is performed on 2.5 mm inner diameter and 3 mm outer diameter OLPHP with an insert of copper wire of 1 mm diameter and fins are added on the condensation section. This investigation is done using methanol and ethanol with 50% filling ratio in OLPHP with 8 loops. In this experiment the effects on the performance of using fins with insert with two different fluids (methanol and ethanol) and the variation of inclination angles are investigated. The results show that the performance characteristics in all the circumstances are better for setup with fin and insert than the normal setup. As higher thermal resistance indicates better performance, so we can say that setup with methanol performs better than ethanol. This performance is best at 45˚ inclination angle. It can be seen that, higher the inclination angle, better the performance and this performance is best at 45˚ inclination angle for this experiment.