Week 7

              Another test trial was conducted to determine the efficiency of the heat pipe. The pipe was held by a stand in a vertical position, so that the flow of liquid into the evaporator section would not only be aided by the wick but also by gravity. The blower was placed right beneath the end of the pipe that marked the beginning of the evaporator section. The thermometer that was meant to measure the temperature at the condenser section was not taped to the pipe as usual, because it was suggested that the tape may prohibit the tip of the thermometer from touching the pipe, thereby leading to inaccurate results. Instead, all three thermometers that measured the temperatures at the evaporator, adiabatic, and condenser sections were held by hand. A challenged faced due to holding the thermometers was that uncontrollable shaking of the hand led to the thermometers' tip often losing contact with the pipe. Even after fifteen minutes had passed by, the evaporator section did not reach a constant temperature, which means that the water inside did not reach its boiling point. The condenser section was still hot despite the water not boiling, because the heat being applied to the pipe could have spread to that section through the copper metal itself and also because the air above the water was getting hot. 100mL of water was inside of the pipe during testing. In the future, less water will be used to fill the pipe so that the water won't take as much time to boil. There was not enough time to wait until all of the liquid had boiled because there were other teams waiting to test their pipes and the lab period had ended. Therefore, the pipe wasn't tested more than once this week.