equipped for developing and testing low to moderate temperature heat pipes

This laboratory is equipped for developing and testing low to moderate temperature heat pipes including flat heat pipes and micro heat pipes. Research in this lab is focused on developing new techniques for the fabrication and testing of heat pipes that greatly reduce fabrication costs and time. Investigations of novel wick structures and their behaviors, such as the impact of wick structure on the working performance and limits.

Current Fabrication Abilities

bendable

flat geometries.

plastic wick

Current Fabrication Abilities include the several wick/container/fluid combinations. These material combinations can be fabricated in either bendable and conformal shapes or flat geometries. Additionally, plastic wick technology using polyethylene beads for loop heat pipes have been fabricated and tested in the porous media test suite.

porous metal powders

sintering furnace

Much of the heat pipe fabrication expertise at AuTherMML is attributable to the sintering capabilities of porous metal powders in both vacuum and hydrogen environments in a sintering furnace.

Porous Measurements of thin and pliable (fuzzy) porous felts is a distinguishing feature of this laboratory. Measurements include imbibition porosimetry, in-plane and cross-plane permeability, pore size distribution using flow porometry, and IPA bubble point.

Extensive modeling capabilities exist using HTPIPE and a finite element analysis code named ANSYS.

An Windows based heat pipe analysis program named HTPIPE Win is available.  This program is a graphical interface (GUI) to HTPIPE, which  is a heat pipe analysis computer program developed at Los Alamos Laboratory.