Abstract

Heat pipes have become highly reliable systems and since 1970's and this technology has been widely applied in various areas, such as heat exchangers, spacecraft thermal control and cooling systems for electronic components. This technology has found increasing application in improving the thermal performance of heat exchangers in many industrial environments. The use of heat pipes in heat exchangers allows the development of more compact and efficient equipments, when compared to traditional heat exchangers. For some applications, such as heat recovery in industrial process, the use of heat pipes on heat exchangers presents to be rather interesting due to its direct influence on increasing the efficiency, allowing a more compact design. In order to investigate the potential application of heat pipes for the purpose of this work, three heat pipes were designed and manufactured for experimental tests using water as the working fluid, operating at mid-range temperatures. To design the heat pipes, a proprietary computational code was used, which has been continuously validated over the last 15 years with many other designs of heat pipes.