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Laser powder bed fusion (LPBF) can be used to fabricate porous wicks with customized geometries for two-phase heat transport devices such as heat pipes; LPBF enables integration of these wicks into any two-phase transport device form factor in a single manufacturing step. Strut-based wicks with four different unit-cell geometries (simple cubic, body-centered cubic, face-centered cubic, and fluorite) with different porosities were designed and fabricated using LPBF. The capillary performance of the wicks was characterized using the mass rate-of-rise (m-t) method and quantified in terms of the ratio of permeability to effective pore radius ( K/r eff ). Both unit-cell geometry and porosity significantly affect the capillarity of these strut-based wicks, with K/r eff ranging from 0.05 to 1.43 μm, which is commensurate with conventional sintered metal wicks. This is due to a relatively high permeability, ranging from 39 μm 2 to 788 μm 2 , and an effective pore radius ranging from 233 μm to 1022 μm. The simple cubic 52 % and 65.1 % porous wicks exhibited the highest capillary performance with a K/r eff of 1.43 μm and 1.31 μm, respectively. These results suggest that modifying the LPBF process for finer feature resolution could result in higher capillarity.
Hasan et al. (Fri,) studied this question.