The objective is to develop and manufacture a flat Loop Heat Pipe evaporator that would allow the evaporator to be in full contact with the Electronic box baseplate. The manufacturing of the flat evaporator shall use new manufacturing technics developed over the past years, e.g.. additive layer manufacturing.

Currently, the Loop heat pipe evaporators are mainly cylindrical in order to cope with the internal working pressure. All electronic units have a flat thermal interface. This means that an LHP requires an thermal interface adaptor from a rectangular flat surface to a cylindrical shape (e.g. saddle). Therefore, these additional thermal interfaces and the small contact area decrease the overall performance of the Loop heat pipe. A large and flat evaporator would allow the LHP to be in full direct contact with the electronic unit, which would increase significantly the heat flow to the fluid.In a previous RD activity, the thin flat LHP evaporator has been studied. The evaporator was manufactured using conventional manufacturing methods which proved to be unfeasible. With the advancement in Additive Layer Manufacturing (ALM), several RD activities are on-going with the aim to manufacture heat pipes with improved and complex capillary structure. Loop heat pipe requires a porous wick with smaller pores size which would be a challenge for the ALM process. However, taking into account the improvements of the technology over the years, it is expected by applying this technology to greatly increase the performance of the LHP and to reduce the manufacturing cost.The activity aims to design and develop an engineering model of such a flat LHP evaporator.