Innovative wick design for multi-source, flat plate heat pipes

We present a novel micro-heat pipe wick design and fabrication technique to significantly boost the effective thermal conductivity of the heat pipe relative to the monolithic substrate material. Extensive porous flow modeling of the process has provided critical information on the key parameters and the resulting anisotropic wick designs have shown robust performance improvements. A methanol charged copper device reported in this paper showed a maximum thermal conductivity of 3240 W/m-K prior to dry out. This represents a better than 8-fold increase over the conductivity of solid copper.