Validation of a heat-pipe experiment using CFD

Heat pipes are playing a more important role in many industrial applications, particularly in improving the thermal performance of heat exchangers and increasing energy savings in applications with commercial use. In this paper, a Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD) model was built to simulate the details of the steam/water two-phase flow and heat transfer phenomena during the operation of a heat pipe. The homogeneous model in ANSYS CFX was used for the simulation. The evaporation, condensation and phase change processes were modelled. The 3D simulations could reproduce the heat and mass transfer processes in comparison with experiments from the literature. Reasonable good agreement was observed between CFD temperature profiles in relation with experimental data.