The primary focus of week 1 was to research the existing designs of a heat pipe, understand the mechanisms at which they operate, and come up with ideas to build an efficient low temperature heat pipe. The main purpose of the heat pipe is to transfer heat from one place to another. Research was conducted on low-temperature applications and the advantage and disadvantage of different designs. After analyzing the information and taking into account the time and budget restriction for this project, an initial design of the heat pipe was generated. The heat pipe will be made of copper tubing with mesh inside the tubes to serve as a wick. There will also be Aluminum heatsink fins at the condenser end to increase surface area for the spreading of heat to the surrounding. The main tasks include research, initial design, ordering of material, generation of CAD model, construction, testing, and optimization. The design and construction of the heat pipe are limited to a budget of $400 and a time period of ten weeks.
The team conducted some more tests on Prototype 2 as it was the best performing heat pipe constructed thus far. The test was conducted in the angled orientation as Prototype 2 hadn't been tested in that configuration yet. The results were promising as Prototype 2 exceeded expectations and transferred heat effectively throughout the test. The condenser end increased by 52 degrees over 300 seconds which was an improvement over the horizontal test conducted with Prototype 2. In both tests, the difference between the condenser temperature and the evaporator temperature was calculated and displayed on the graphs. The graph below shows the first test for Prototype 2. To verify our results the test was run a second time but for a longer period of time in order to narrow down on where the heat pipe's maximum operating temperature would be. The results are shown below. For Prototype 2, the effective temperature limit of the heat pipe can be approximated to 125 F without a hea...
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