THERMAL PERFORMANCE PREDICTION OF HEAT PIPE WITH TiO2 NANOFLUIDS USING RSM

Heat pipe is a two-phase heat transfer device with high effective thermal conductivity and transfer huge amount of heat with minimum temperature gradient in between evaporator and condenser section. This paper objective is to predict the thermal performance in terms of thermal resistance, R, and heat transfer coefficient, h, of screen mesh wick heat pipe with deionized water-TiO2 as working fluid. The input process parameters of heat pipe such as heat load, Q, tilt angle, theta, and concentration of nanofluid, phi, were modeled and optimized by utilizing response surface methodology with MINITAB-17 software to attain minimum thermal resistance and maximum heat transfer coefficient. The minimum thermal resistance of 0.1764 degrees C per W and maximum heat transfer coefficient of 1411.52 W/m(2) degrees C was obtained under the optimized conditions of 200 W heat load, 57.2 degrees tilt angle, and 0.159 vol.% concentration of nanofluid.