A series of experiments was conducted to investigate the performance characteristics of a heat pipe with a hybrid wick that combined grooves and a wire screen. The heat pipe in this study was designed primarily for the cooling of high-density power electronic elements such as IGBTs, and it had tiny triangular grooves along its entire length. The container was a copper tube which had an outer diameter of 19 mm and length of 0.8 m, and the working fluid was water. To lower the thermal resistance against increased thermal loads, a higher performance was desired for the heat pipe, without changing the external dimensions. A fine mesh wire screen was partially applied to the evaporator to enhance the heat transfer performance. The hybrid wick heat pipe was tested and analyzed from the viewpoints of thermal resistance, effective thermal conductance, and operating temperature. For a 1.6 kW effective thermal load, as a typical result, the heat pipe with the hybrid wick exhibited a 70 % decrease in thermal resistance compared to that with a groove wick only. The paper includes results for various thermal loads and fluid charges. The results herein can be utilized in applications that require an intensive enhancement in heat pipe performance.

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