Numerical Study of a Cooling System Using Phase Change of a Refrigerant in a Thermosyphon

Abstract

With the increasing trend toward the miniaturization of electronic devices, the issue of heat dissipation becomes essential. The use of phase changes in a two-phase closed thermosyphon (TPCT) enables a significant reduction in the heat generated even at high temperatures. In this paper, we propose a modification of the evaporation–condensation model implemented in ANSYS Fluent. The modification was to manipulate the value of the mass transfer time relaxation parameter for evaporation and condensation. The developed model in the form of a UDF script allowed the introduction of additional source equations, and the obtained solution is compared with the results available in the literature. The variable value of the mass transfer time relaxation parameter during condensation rc depending on the density of the liquid and vapour phase was taken into account in the calculations. However, compared to previous numerical studies, more accurate modelling of the phase change phenomenon of the medium in the thermosyphon was possible by adopting a mass transfer time relaxation parameter during evaporation re = 1. The assumption of ten-fold higher values resulted in overestimated temperature values in all sections of the thermosyphon. Hence, the coefficient re should be selected individually depending on the case under study. A too large value may cause difficulties in obtaining the convergence of solutions, which, in the case of numerical grids with many elements (especially three-dimensional), significantly increases the computation time.

Keywords

• two-phase closed thermosyphon
• numerical model
• thermal resistance
• computational fluid dynamics
• evaporation