Morphological and physical study of Cu-Ni sintered porous wicks used in heat pipes and fuel cells

Abstract

Recently, the use of renewable energies has increased to environmental pollution, limitation of fossil energy resources and energy security One of the means that enable us to use such energies is fuel cells (FC). However, there are many problems in the commercialization of FC from an economically and operation perspective. One of the most important problems is heat management. New heat pipes are being developed for this purpose. A heat pipe is made from a “porous coat” on a base metal. In this study, a Cu-Ni porous layer with a thickness of ~300µm was considered as the coating on a Cu-Ni base metal with two kinds of powder (mixed and ball milled). The morphology and physical properties of the coatings, such as porosity, permeability and effective thermal conductivity, were investigated. The best permeability was obtained for the base metals coated with powder which was ball milled for 6 hours. Thermal conductivity of samples increased (by 9.5%) when using ball milled powder. Porosity of coated samples decreased with ball milled powder in comparison to mixed powder.

Keywords

• copper-nickel powder
• sintered porous wicks
• porosity
• permeability
• heat pipe & fuel cell
• thermal conductivity