Experimental investigation of boiling regimes in a capillary-fed two-layer evaporator wick

•Two-layer evaporator wick designs for vapor chambers are fabricated and tested.•A novel test facility is developed to characterize capillary-fed boiling in wicks while avoiding flooding.•Two-layer wicks offer significant enhancement in dryout heat flux compared to a conventional single-layer wick.•High-speed visualizations are used to observe the boiling regimes as a function of heat flux.•Top-down liquid feeding in two-layer wicks avoids partial dryout and maintains low-thermal- resistance operation. Vapor chambers with transformative evaporator wick designs capable of passively dissipating high heat fluxes over large areas, while maintaining low thermal resistances, can meet the thermal management needs of next-generation power semiconductor devices. Our prior work proposed a two-layer evaporator wick structure to enhance the performance of vapor chambers operating at high heat fluxes. The current study experimentally characterizes the capillary-fed boiling heat transfer behavior in such a two-layer evaporator wick, compared to a homogeneous (single-layer) wick, over a 1 cm2 evaporator area. The two-layer design comprises a thin base wick layer that is fed with liquid from a thick cap wick layer above using an array of vertical posts. The two-layer wick is fabricated using a sequence of sintering and laser-machining steps to form the base wick layer (200 µm), array of liquid-feeding posts, and cap wick layer (800 µm) using 90–106 µm copper particles. A test facility is constructed to replicate the conditions that exist at the evaporator of a vapor chamber; the novel facility design uses a physical restriction to prevent flooding of the wicks during testing. Two-layer wicks having 5 × 5 and 10 × 10 arrays of liquid feeding posts are characterized, along with a 200 µm-thick single-layer evaporator wick. The 10 × 10 array provides a >400% enhancement in the dryout heat flux compared to the single-layer wick. High-speed visualizations are used to identify the characteristic regimes of boiling operations for the wicks. The single-layer wick exhibits a partial dryout mode of operation, where a dry spot formed in the center of the heated evaporator area causes an increase in the thermal resistance with heat flux. In contrast, the distributed feeding provided by the two-layer wicks mitigates the development of this partial dryout regime and maintains a constant low resistance (∼0.1 K/W) during capillary-fed boiling until a complete dryout event occurs. This stu