Experimental Study on Heat Transfer Performance of Elliptical Loop Heat Pipe

Applying heat pipe to electric vehicle battery thermal management can make up for some shortcomings of liquid cooling and air cooling. A gravity elliptical loop heat pipe was made in this experiment. The effects of forced convection cooling wind speed in condensation section, internal vacuum of heat pipe and filling rate of heat pipe on performance were studied. The data illustrate that the larger the wind speed of the condensation section, the larger the heat transfer amount and the higher the thermal efficiency; the cooling wind speed of the condensation section has a greater influence on the thermal efficiency. As the increase of liquid filling rate, the heat transfer amount and thermal efficiency show a trend of increasing first and then decreasing. The experiment shows that the thermal efficiency reaches the highest as the liquid filling rate is 50%. The higher the degree of vacuum, the larger the heat transfer rate, and the higher the thermal efficiency. The equivalent thermal conductivity is up to 17620.5 W/(m·K) in the experiment.