Visual Study on Flow and Operational Characteristics of Flat Plate Closed Loop Pulsating Heat Pipes

This paper presents an experimental study including visualization on a flat plate closed loop pulsating heat pipes.It consists of a total of 40 channels with square cross section(2 mm×2 mm,165 mm long) machined directly on an aluminum plate(180 mm×120 mm×3 mm) covered by a transparent plate.The working fluid employed is ethanol.As a result,various flow patterns and their transitions are observed and found to be related to the fluid fill ratio,input heat load and the device orientation.Also the operational characteristics and working mechanism are discussed.