Heat Pipes in Electronics Cooling Applications: A Review

Heat pipes are used for highly effective heat conduction with two-phase heat transfer based on conduction and convection. These are much smaller heat exchangers to handle high heat flux with very little temperature difference between the two ends, i.e., evaporator and condenser of the heat pipe. In the process of cooling, a condensable and easily evaporable fluid is used as heat carrier to transport the heat from evaporator section to condenser section of the heat pipe, where the vapour condense and release the heat. Due to small in size and effective heat exchanging properties, heat pipes are used in electronics circuits for semiconductors microprocessors cooling purposes. In this paper, the use of novel heat pipes in electronics has been reviewed concerning the different types of heat pipes, such as micro heat pipe, micro-grooved heat pipe, loop heat pipe, capillary pumped loop heat pipe, inverted meniscus heat pipe, and pulsating heat pipe for their varying cooling performance in electronics.