Caractérisation du transport fluidique et thermique dans les mousses métalliques capillaires en cuivre

Abstract

Thermal management of electronics has become a major challenge in manufacturing and production of high performance electronic chips. Constant rise of computation power requires higher amount of energy and subsequently this energy (in the form of heat) should be transferred out of the computer. Among other solutions, heat pipes are proposed as a means to transfer and eventually remove this excess heat. The main part of a typical heat pipe is the wick which provides a medium for transport of capillary driven flow and evaporation at the vapor-liquid interface. Different materials are proposed as wick for a heat pipe and among them, recently invented Bi-porous metal foams exhibit a very significant performance improve, i.e. high transport limit in comparison with competing materials. By a mainly experimental approach, capillary, wetting and evaporation properties of copper metal foams with different porosities have been investigated. An in depth surface characterization study is done on the foams to identify the role of surface wettability on the capillary performance. It is found for the first time that the hydrophilicity loss of the copper based porous materials when exposed to air is caused by the adsorption of volatile organic compounds and not by copper oxidation. It is also inferred that the reason for high transport limit of the foams compared with other materials is their unique microstructure which has two levels of porosity. This biporous microstructure provides paths for liquid transport with low pressure drop while the smaller pores provide for thin film evaporation and produce high capillary pressure. Permeability and effective pore radius, as two key parameters defining the pumping capacity, are measured experimentally by the rate of rise method. It is also found that the evaporation rate of a rising liquid in a porous material is lower compared with that of the same material while saturated with stationary liquid. This will allow ignoring natural evaporation in the rate of rise method and using simplified models to capture permeability and effective pore radius. The role of meniscus recession in capillary pumping and evaporation rate is characterized for the first time and a model is proposed to measure the effective pore radius of porous materials in operating conditions. It is shown that the effective pore radius can decrease up to 50% due to forced evaporation. In a more general perspective, through different experiments, it is shown that there is a coupling between capillarity and evaporation. This coupling is established through variation in meniscus shape which will affect both capillarity and evaporation. The findings of this thesis will shed light on the capillarity, evaporation and their interconnected nature in the capillary wicks in two phase thermal management devices.