Investigation of the Heat Transfer Performance of a Capillary Pumped Ammonia Loop Under Gravity

A capillary pumped two-phase ammonia heat transport loop, developed at Lavochkin Assoc., Moscow, was tested under laboratory conditions at ERNO, Bremen.

The tubular capillary pump evaporator contains a sintered Nickel powder body with a small pore size of 1. 5 μm. The line diameter of the vapour and the liquid line is only 6 mm and 4 mm, respectively, allowing an easy accomodation to any architecture in the filled state.

The objective of the test was to determine the heat transport performance of the loop under different orientations w.r.t. gravity under steady state and transient, in particular priming load conditions. The tests have demonstrated a large heat transport performance of more than 1100 W in a vertical orientation, where the evaporator was located 2 m (!) above the condenser. The priming ability appears to depend on the load timeline as well as on the orientation. A successful priming seems to require a fast increase of the heat load to an orientation-dependant minimum value. The present paper briefly outlines the loop design and describes in detail the results of the test program.