![]() ![]() They are very effectivly used in evacuated tube solar thermal systems that actually just use water and propylene glycol as the working fluid for that temperature range. They are low maintence as there are no moving parts, and when they are well designed, they can be quite effective. It evaporates at one end, then condenses at the other, the fluid then runs via gravity or wicked via a membrane to the other end where it evaporates again. Heat pipes use a fluid that phase changes at a temperature between the two temperatures it is transporting between. Similarly once you have the basic elements of a liquid cooled system it is very scalable.Īnother advantage of fluid systems is that they work across a large range of temperatures, eg water cooling will work between 0C and 100C and that range can be further extended with additives and it is usually fairly easy to control the system to get a target temperature at various points in the system by the simple expedient of controlling the fluid flow-rate. There is also the consideration that if you have large and geometrically complex components with large volumes it may be easier to have channels running through their existing internal structure than to try to find surfaces to attach heat pipes and you can cool a large and complex structure with a centralised pump and radiator eg an engine block. It also has the advantage that it is reasonably simple to design a custom system using fluid cooling in terms of piping routes and radiator and fan capacities using fairly standard off the shelf components. Liquid cooling becomes more attractive as the heat loads get larger and you get beyond the limitations of needing to miniaturise pumps. Having said that water cooling for high performance desktop PCs is becoming increasingly mainstream so there is a certain amount of overlap. For laptops they may be the only way to package adequate cooling for modern processors and even for desktops they make it more convenient to design and package high capacity coolers by making it possible to move the heat-sink away from the processor itself for greater size and better airflow. Similarly heat pipes are now a pretty standard component in CPU coolers. Here the advantage is that they are small, simple and require no power supply and little maintenance. Heat pipes are very useful when you have limited space to work with or you want an entirely sealed and self contained unit.Īn interesting example of this is that heat pipes are used to cool the legs of oil pipelines which run through permafrost areas, the cooling is required to stop the heat generate by friction in the pipe and solar heating from conducting through the support legs and melting the ground under them. ![]()
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