TPCTs made of materials having light weight and good thermal
conductivity attract attention in the area of electronic cooling,
aerospace and telecommunication, etc. Due to the increasing demand
for ‘‘light weight’’ thermosyphon heat pipes, development
of the next generation advanced TPCT for aerospace applications
has became imperative. Aluminum TPCTs [1,2] are being widely
used in these areas over the past few decades. Improvement in
the performance of the TPCT leads to reduction in size and weight
of TPCT thus enabling accommodation of higher payloads on the
space vehicles. Therefore considering the benefits of miniaturization,
‘‘lightweight’’ has become a high priority goal for current
TPCT design especially for space applications.
In recent years, Nanofluids have been used as working fluids in
TPCTs [3–15] and it has been found that the nanofluid enhances
the performance of the TPCT considerably. Xue et al. [3] carried
out an experiment to study the interface effect of carbon nanotube
suspension on the thermal performance of a TPCT. In this study an
aqueous solution of carbon nanotubes, treated by a concentrated
nitric/sulfuric acid mixture to disentangle the nanotubes, was utilized
as the working medium. In comparison with the TPCT filled
with de-ionized water, the one filled with carbon nanotube suspension
gained high evaporator temperature, incipient temperature