小川 博之

This paper investigated the effect of filling pressure on the operating characteristics of a gravity-assisted cryogenic loop heat pipe(CLHP) for use in gravity environments such as terrestrial and lunar environments. The CLHP wick is made of sintered stainless-steel fibers with a pore radius of 1.56 μm and designed with a heat transport distance of 2.05 m. The experiments were conducted under gravity-assisted conditions (the condenser was placed 0.1 m higher than the evaporator). Notably, the filling pressure originated from the assumed vapor-liquid distribution in the CLHP under steady-state conditions. The filling pressure was varied from 2.9 MPa to 3.4 MPa in 0.1 MPa increments for six different conditions. Specifically, (1) 2.9 MPa and (2) 3.0 MPa are conditions where the heat leakage due to the vapor phase in the evaporator core is large, while (3) 3.1 MPa and (4) 3.2 MPa are conditions where there is no vapor phase in the evaporator core and the surplus vapor phase escapes to the CC. In general, this condition is considered to be the optimum amount of working fluid for room-temperature LHPs when designing. (5) 3.3 MPa and (6) 3.4 MPa are overfilling conditions that cause the CC to be filled with liquid. The results revealed that the higher the filling pressure, the more obvious the variation in operating temperature caused by the transition of drive modes. The maximum heat transfer capability reached 25 W in cases (1)-(4). In cases (5) and (6), the heat transfer capabilities increased to 30 W, although the operating temperature was higher. Furthermore, the hysteresis effect under different filling pressure conditions was newly confirmed. The power cycling experiments demonstrated that hysteresis in the operating temperature occurred at high heat loads and showed a similar trend to the room-temperature LHP.