Project

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Two-phase fluid pressure drops analysis for a helicoidal capillary heat pipe

What is our experiment about? What is a PHP? Who are we and we do we come from? Find an answer to some of these fundamental questions in this page.

A Pulsating Heat Pipe (PHP) is a device used to bring the heat from a hot source inside of a spacecraft to an external cold source, which is usually a radiator. It consists of a simple capillary tube, evacuated and partially filled with a working fluid. The interplay between liquid/vapor phase change and the confined flow regime allows to transport heat passively in a very efficient way in microgravity conditions.

In order to investigate properly this device, it needs to be tested where it belongs to be (in space, but unfortunately we can’t go to space yet): in microgravity conditions! Such conditions can be found in a very unique enviroment, that is a Parabolic Flight Campaign.

Parabolic flights reproduce microgravity conditions in an aircraft by alternating upward and downward arcs interspersed with level flight.

Air Zero G © Novespace
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  • To enrich scientific knowledge of how PHPs work, both in static and dynamic conditions;
  • To investigate an innovative method to measure the PHP fluid flow frequency through the Inverse Heat Transfer Problem!

Deployable Pulsating Heat Pipe

A PHP is a capillary tube, bent and filled with a coolant fluid. Our PHP is a little special, because it is foldable: it can be opened and closed at request.

Thermal Subsystem

The Thermal susystem is made of all the components that are going to heat up and cool down the PHP, in order to let us observe how it works.

Automation Subsystem

The PHP can bend, but we want it to do bend at request, with no manual operation needed. This is when our automation subsystem will come in handy!

Data Acquision Subsystem

To observe how something works means that you have to measure it. We will look very closely at our PHP with a lot of different sensors and an IR camera.

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