Experimental investigation of liquid metal emulsion effect on the heat transfer performance of an oscillating heat pipe

Abstract

This thesis introduces an oscillating heat pipe (OHP) charged with a hybrid fluid of gallium and ethanol. The hybrid fluid is fabricated using an ultrasonication technique to produce an emulsion-based mixture of liquid metal gallium microdroplets suspended in an ethanol solution. The hybrid fluid OHP is modelled and numerically simulated in ANSYS Fluent using the volume of fluid (VOF) technique to analyze its startup behavior, steadystate oscillatory flow, and heat transfer performance. The heat transfer performance of the OHP is investigated experimentally with different mass concentrations of gallium at a 50 percent filling ratio. The OHP is fabricated from a copper plate and contains a six-turn channel with a 3 x 3 mm2 cross-section. Steady-state oscillating motion is achieved with weight concentrations of gallium up to 20 percent. The experimental results show that using gallium-inethanol hybrid fluid emulsion as the working fluid can increase the heat transfer of the OHP by up to 7.8 percent over pure ethanol at 300 W.