The Experimental Research Of The Use Of Capillary Pumped Loop In The Recovery System Of The Industrial Waste Heat

Capillary Pumped Loop(CPL) is widely used in the temperature control of the spacecraft and the cooling of electronic devices, the operating principle is that using the latent heat of the working fluid to transfer heat from distance, just like the heat pipe, but compared with the heat pipe, the CPL has a stronger heat transfer capability and anti-gravity performance. Because of these advantages, the CPL is suit to the recovery of low-temperature industrial waste heat. For this point, this paper devised a set of flat CPL with water as the working medium, and made the experiment research of it.The flat evaporator consisting with the detachable up and down plates was chosen to decrease the thermal resistance between the CPL and the heat source. In order to research the influence of the thermal conductivity from the jamb wall to the evaporator, the VOF multiphase flow model was used to simulate with the evaporator. The results show that decreasing the thickness of the down plate jamb wall or using low thermal conductivity material to be the down plate could decrease the conduction heat from the jamb wall, and sequentially avoid the system fail caused by the liquid vaporization under the wick. In this paper, the up plate of the evaporator was made of copper; the down plate was made of PTFE and the wick was made of filter paper.The experiment research of the CPL properties include that:the start-up performance, operation stability, the impact of the heat source direction, anti-gravity height, the heat transfer efficiency and the operation of a loop with two parallel evaporators. The results show that the CPL has a good startup performance and operational stability, and without the temperature fluctuation; the different direction of heat source had no effect on the operation of the system; the anti-gravity height is 0.6m which could meet the less demanding situations of gravity height; the heat transfer efficiency of the system was about 70%, and the temperature difference between the evaporator and the condenser have great influence of the efficiency; a system with two evaporators has good performance and it verified the heat concentration function of the CPL. The CPL is a heat transfer set, in order to utilize the heat which transferred by the CPL, a set could recover industrial waste heat and transform it to electric energy was designed which combined with thermoelectric generate technology and the CPL, and the efficiency was researched by experiment. Finally, aim at the recovery of the waste heat from the aluminum reduction cell s sidewalls, a set of heat transfer, electric power generation, and the power control system was designed. The thermal efficiency of the set is 3.5% by theoretical analysis, and could produce electricity 19.8kWh per ton aluminum, so this set has a certain economic benefit.