THE ROLE OF HYBRID NANOFLUIDS IN IMPROVING THE THERMAL CHARACTERISTICS OF SCREEN MESH CYLINDRICAL HEAT PIPES

Experiments were conducted to study the thermal performance of meshed wick heat pipe by varying the working fluid and heat input. In this work four screen mesh wicked heat pipes were fabricated and tested. All the heat pipes were tested for heat input from 50 W to 250 W each with an increment of 50 Win each step. The heat input range selected in this study is commonly encoountered in most of the electronic application devices. The thermal resistance of all the heat pipes charged with different working fluids such as de-ionised water, Al2O3/de-ionised water nanofluid of volume concentration 0.1%, and hybrid nanofluid volume concentration 0.1%, with two afferent combinations of (Al2O3 50%-CuO 50%)/de-ionised water and (Al2O3 25%-CuO 75%)/de-ionised water, was determined. The maximum percentage reduction was found to be 58.87% for the hybrid nanofluid of (Al2O3 25%-CuO 75%)/de-ionised water compared to base fluid. An important observation from the study is that, use of hybrid nanofluid can raise the operating range of the heat pipe beyond 250 W which makes hybrid nanofluid as a potential substitute for the conventional working fluid.