Development of Meter-Scale U-Shaped and O-Shaped Oscillating Heat Pipes for GAPS

Abstract

A meter-scale Oscillating Heat Pipe (OHP) has been developed for the General Anti-Particle Spectrometer (GAPS) project. Two types of OHP routing, U-shaped and O-shaped, have been investigated. For the operation at low temperature, R410A was used as the working fluid. As the result of the investigation, we verified for the first time that both the meter-scale U-shaped and O-shaped OHPs can transfer heat under gravity in a wide temperature range between 20°C and -60°C. Generally, the O-shaped OHP showed better performance than the U-shaped OHP. Both OHP models showed good thermal conductance and a good amount of heat transport under the particular sets of conditions which meet the design requirements. In order to clarify the drive force to operate OHP to further improve the OHP design, the performance difference between the U-shaped and the O-shaped models has been interpreted in terms of the gravity effect and the pressure loss.