Study On Performance Of Heat Pipe Generator Based On Metal Foam

China has abundant resources of waste heat,which can be used as heat source in a separate type of generator based on heat pipes.Because of it's advantages of energy conservation and environmental protection,it has been widely concerned by scholars at home and abroad.The heat pipes have been filled with foam metal to further promoting heat conduction.But the filling amount has great influence on the heat transfer efficiency.So,the performance of the heat pipe generator based on metal foam is studied.In this paper,copper foam and water are selected as the filling materials and working fluid.The filling length and filling position are tooken as study objects.First,the temperature of vapor at outlet and the volume fraction of vapor in the heat pipe are gotten by setting monitors in FUENT.when the filling position remains unchanged,with the increase of the filling length,volume fraction of vapor will increase sharply and then decrease,finally increase.But the outlet temperature decreases and then increases.And when the filling length is constant,with the increase of the filling position of the copper foam,the outlet temperature of vapor will increase at first and then decrease.Secondly,through the combination of theoretical derivation and formula fitting with software of Origin,the functions,the heat transfer quantity,of filling length or filling position are obtained respectively.Thirdly,the optimal solutions of two equations are determined through golden section method with MATLAB.Finally,the formulas are applied to the condensation section,and it's thermal properties are simulated by FLUENT and compared with the control group without foam copper.The results show that the effect of heat transfer enhancement is best,when the copper foam is filled with a length of 334 mm from the bottom of the heat pipe.And the performance of condensation section applied the two formulas is obviously better than that of the control group.Moreover,the analysis method and results provide an important reference for the optimization design of separate generator with heat pipes based on metal foam.