A conjugate heat transfer model of oscillating heat pipe dynamics, performance, and dryout

Oscillating heat pipes (OHPs) consist of a serpentine capillary channel partially filled with liquid that is embedded in a thermally-conducting solid. They have significant advantages for cooling electronics and aerospace systems. The model reported here aims to capture the essential physics of an OHP with minimal complexity and treats some parameters typically derived from correlations or experiments (such as the film thickness and film triple point velocity) as functions with tunable constants to be estimated by data assimilation. This model contains two modules. The first uses a novel and flexible formulation of the conducting solid, solving the two-dimensional heat equation in a thin plate, with evaporators and condensers as immersed forcing terms and the OHP channel as an immersed line source. The second module solves one-dimensional fluid motion and heat transfer equations within the fluid-filled channels based on mass, momentum, and energy conservation, nucleate boiling, and bubble dryout. It extends the commonly-used film evaporation-condensation model, allowing both variable liquid film thickness and length and thereby enabling the model to capture dryout. These modules are weakly coupled, in that wall temperature in the channels are obtained from the first module and heat flux from the channels determines the line source strength. After minimal training, the thermal conductance calculated by this model shows good agreement with a wide range of experiments performed by Drolen et al. [1]. In particular, the model successfully predicts the experimentally-observed transition from stable OHP operation to dryout, for the first time to the authors' knowledge. •A two-dimensional conjugate heat transfer model for flat-plate OHPs is proposed.•The model aims to capture essential physics with minimal complexity.•The immersed boundary method is used to couple the fluids model and the solid model.•This model is validated with ASETS-II experiment for 16 cases with Butane as the working fluid.•The dry-out phenomenon is successfully captured after minimal training.