Thermal Performance of Vapour Chamber in Different Tilting Configurations for Battery Liquid Cooling System

Abstract Vapour chamber is a planar heat pipe and has been widely used in the thermal management of electronic device. In this work, a grooved aluminium vapour chamber was presented with a one-through cooling plate to develop a simplified and practicable battery liquid cooling system. The impact of filling ratio and tilting configuration on the thermal performance of vapour chamber was experimentally investigated. The results showed that the thermal resistance of the vapour chamber increased gradually with the increase in filling ratio, and there was a deterioration of the heat transfer in tilting configuration. However, the vapour chamber at 20% filling ratio had a better performance at positive tilting angle configuration compared with that at negative tilting angle configuration. Moreover, the temperature distribution of the heating surface is fairly uniform with the application of the vapour chamber. Despite the temperature rise of the cooling water in the cooling plate up to 3.8ºC, the minimum temperature difference of the heating surface could be kept within 1 ºC and the minimum thermal resistance could be kept within 0.075ºC/W. The results indicate that the temperature difference of the heating surface can be suppressed through the heat and mass transport of phases inside the vapour chamber.