Experimental Measurement and Analysis of Performance of Heat Pipe Heat Exchanger Used in a Turbocharged Engine with Intercooling

Turbocharging technology with higher compression ratio has been widely applied in engines and the strength loss of an aluminum charge air cooler becomes a problem attracting increased attention. The heat pipe charge air cooler (HPCAC) is a new type of CAC that can withstand high temperature. An experimental study of a gravity-assisted HPCAC was performed. Several configurations of heat pipe heat exchangers were constructed and tested under different operation conditions on the testing rig. The effects of tube pitch, heat pipe line, and condenser length on the performance were investigated and an optimal configuration in this study was obtained. Then effects of inlet cooling air velocity, inlet compressed air temperature, and velocity on the heat transfer and pressure drop for a fixed tube pitch and condenser length were analyzed, and the results were compared with the theoretical simulation. The experiment results showed that the HPCAC could remove the heat load efficiently to ensure that the aluminum CAC works under a safe temperature, which indicated that HPCAC is a suitable approach and effort to solve aluminum strength loss at high temperature.