As the demand for high performance small electronic devices has increased, heat removal from these devices for space use is approaching critical limits. A heat pipe is a promising device to enhance the heat removal performance due to the phase change phenomena for space thermal management system. Even though a heat pipe has a big potential to remove the thermal energy from a high heat flux source, the heat removal performance of heat pipes cannot be predicted well since the first principle of evaporation has not been established. The purpose of this study is to establish a method to apply the evaporation model based on the statistical rate theory for engineering application including vapor-liquid-structure intermolecular effect. The evaporation model is applied to the heat pipe performance analysis through a pressure balance and an energy balance in the loop heat pipe.
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