Sisyphus I’ll give you $5 to roll that rock back down right now
aaaaanyway, ladies and gentlemen- we got him.
A Reddit Refugee. Zero ragrets.
Engineer, permanent pirate, lover of all things mechanical and on wheels
moved here from lemmy.one because there are no active admins on that instance.
Sisyphus I’ll give you $5 to roll that rock back down right now
aaaaanyway, ladies and gentlemen- we got him.
“Yes” with the asterisk that there is no phase change, and the flow paths are segregated.
In a heat pipe, water is installed such that it is kept near it’s liquid-gas phase change point on the pressure-temperature curve. When heated, it turns to “steam”, travels thru the center of the pipe, condenses back to liquid on the cold/fins side (giving off all it’s heat), then returns via capillary action on the metal foam walls of the pipe.
In a thermosiphon, the water never leaves the liquid phase. It simply relies on the density change based on temperature (hot water becomes less dense, and will rise to the top of a column) to force some circulation to occur. The hot fluid rises out of the heatsink and displaces the cooled water in the radiator, which then flows down the other side to return to the heatsink.
Very old cars (<1920) used to rely entirely upon the thermosiphon effect, rather than a pump.
It’s not terribly efficient, especially at higher dissipated power densities. They are also very prone to being overloaded with heat, if the overall loop temperature gets too high and/or the radiator loses some efficiency (e.g clogged with dust), the water can start to boil on the hot plate side and you’ll lose basically all cooling effect when your siphon is blocked with steam.