Increasing cooling efficiency with electric field and feedback

In this article, we present mesoscopic simulations of the fluid flow and heat transfer in a model of a heat pipe with the action of a non-uniform electric field on the fluid, based on the lattice Boltzmann method. We demonstrate in numerical experiments the possibility to realize the controlled quasiperiodic flow of a film of dielectric liquid in the vicinity of a non-conductive inset using the cyclic change of the electric field and the regularly switching flow of liquid condensed in the cold section back to the cooled hot surface. We model the process of the pulse action of a non-uniform electric field on the liquid film with a feedback based on the thickness of the liquid films at the cooling region and at the vapor condenser. Such combined action ensures the increased average value of the heat flux from the heater. In our experiments, the value of the heat flux was 1.7 times higher than the heat flux without the electric field for the same geometry of the region, the same temperatures, and the same amount of the cooling fluid.