Performance Characteristics of a Heat Pipe Having Water-Ethanol Mixture as Working Fluid for Evacuated Solar Collectors

초록

Heat pipes are considered to be promising candidates to enhance the heat transport capability of evacuated solar collectors in a wide temperature range. The working fluid must be selected properly considering various operating conditions of heat pipes for medium-high temperature range to avoid dry-out, local overheating, and frozen failure. The advantage of using binary mixture as heat pipe working fluid is that it can extend operating temperature range of the system as it can overcome operating temperature limit of a single fluid. Various operating temperature ranges were imposed in the experiments to simulate the actual operation of solar collectors using water-ethanol binary mixture. Tests were conducted for the coolant temperature range of -10℃ to 120℃, and mixing ratio range was from 0 to 1 based on mass fraction.

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