Experimental Study Of Multi-Eevaporator Capillary Pump Loop

Owning to the advantages of high efficiency, energy saving, high precision of temperature control than that of ordinary heat pipes, the capillary pump loop (CPL) has board applications and plays an increasingly more important role in the space shuttle in terms of thermal control and electronic cooling. In order to solve the problems with regard to multiply heat sources, high power equipment and extension type radiator, multi-evaporator CPL systems have been developed and are gaining increasing attention in recent years.In the present paper, the working principle and operating characteristics of the CPL system, as well as the corresponding CPL experimental systems developed at domestic and abroad are first reviewed. Based on the previous experimental and theoretical result, the overall design of the experimental set-up of a multi-evaporator CPL system and its corresponding heat transfer model are then developed. Different from the single evaporator of CPL system, the multi-evaporator CPL system having four evaporators in parallel can meet the requirements of multiply heat sources and high power radiator. At the same time, a set of safety and convenient medium filling system and test system are designed and manufactured. Finally, the starting-up characteristics and operation performance of the multi-evaporator CPL system have been experimentally tested.The experimental results demonstrated that the new-designed multi-evaporator CPL system developed in this paper has the advantages of high reliable and stable behavior of start-up and can stable work both in high or low heat load. The good start-up characteristics and isotherm performance of the multi-evaporator CPL system can satisfy to some extent the special cooling requirements of multiply heat sources, high power equipment and extension type radiator.