Date of Award

1994

Document Type

Thesis - Restricted

Degree Name

Master of Science (MS)

Department

Electrical and Computer Engineering

Abstract

Heat pipe is a unique heat transfer device. It is widely used in aerospace, medical field, construction and electronic equipment thermal control, etc. There have been many investigations of heat pipe performance characteristics and applications. However, there are no design tools, in the form of software, in the public domain, which may be used for heat pipe design. The intent of this research effort is to develop a software based heat pipe design tool, which may be used to define a heat pipe design appropriate for a specified application. The design tool should also predict the critical performance characteristics of the specified heat pipe. This software based heat pipe tool is designed for public usage. Moreover, such a tool may be quite useful in the undergraduate thermal & fluid sciences curricular in Mechanical Engineering. In order to develop the design tool, fundamental models of the thermal & fluid phenomena of heat pipe operation have been utilized. These models have been incorporated in the software base heat pipe design tool. The implementing programming language is Microsoft Visual C++. For the current research effort, the particular advantage of Visual C++ is its flexibility in producing a graphical user interface (GUI) and a menu based user environment.

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