Question about heat pipes

[FishDog3]

Is it possible to make a heat pipe so that the medium (say freon) would boil in the hot end travel to the cooling end... but instead of just condensing and flowing back down the way it came up, be set up to flow through a heat sink/radiator at the cooling end and down a different tube back to the hot end.

I was thinking this might be more efficient as it would be a circular system and the freon would flow through it as in an air conditioner but without the compressor.

is this possible or am I deifying the laws of thermal dynamics?

fd

 

[cjtune]

The cold end of heat pipes must interface with some kinda heat sink or radiator anyhow. I think it's the way the felt and the hollow part of the heat pipe that is arranged in a concentric (ie. pipe-in-a-pipe) way that gives a heat pipe the ability to function as it is. I'm no expert on this subject but I do think that you cannot separate the liquid freon (in the felt) and the gaseous freon from each other in different pipe. Otherwise, this natural (ie. passive/unpowered) cycle of heat transfer cannot happen.

What you are discribing is actually your average refridgeration cycle and it MUST have a compressor otherwise the refridgerant will exist in a state of mixed liquid and gas throughout the piping without any general direction of travel.

 

[FishDog3]

That's what I thought, I guess I was trying to think up a way to make a normal refrigeration cycle without the compressor, don't think that is possible.

Well on to my next harebrained idea, taking the fridge system out of a mini/dorm room fridge and adapting it to cool a cpu.

 

[whiskeyinajar]

how do you hook up a compressor to a cooling setup?

 

[cjtune]

whiskeyinajar (Jul 10, 2001 12:03 a.m.):
how do you hook up a compressor to a cooling setup?

What, a REFRIDGERATION setup? Gee man, I'm not too sure but it's gotta be after the condenser coils and you'll need some fair welding/brazing skills. If you're planning to do water-cooling with the compressor, someone has already done that before and it works fine -underwater too! But I'd sooner recommend you go get a dedicated WATER pump rather than a compressor.