Numerical investigations of small diameter two-phase closed thermosyphon

In this work, a CFD model is developed to simulate the working of a 6mm diameter two-phase closed thermosyphon using water as the working fluid. At each section (evaporator, condenser, adiabatic) of the thermosyphon, lumped equations have been developed to calculate the temperatures at corresponding sections. In order to process two phase flow inside the system, a user-defined function (UDF) has been developed and integrated with the CFD model. The volume of fluid (VOF) method is used to carry out the simulations in Ansys FLUENT 15 and the lumped equations are solved in MATLAB 2013a. Volume fractions and temperature profiles obtained from CFD simulations and the lumped parametric estimations are found to be in good agreement with the experimental results available in literature.