On the effect of gravity on the bifurcation of rectangular closed-loop thermosiphon

Closed-loop thermosyphons are systems in which heat is transferred from a source to a sink by means of a natural convective flow, i.e. without the help of mechanical pumping. In fact, the dynamics of such systems strongly depend both on the thermal boundary conditions and on the gravitational field in which they operate. While the effect of variations of the boundary conditions has been extensively analysed in the last decades, the dependence on gravity has never been explicitly studied.The aim of this paper is to examine the effect of variations of gravity as well as that of thermal boundary conditions on the dynamics of natural circulation loops. Such an analysis might point out some useful applications for the cooling of a generic source in reduced gravity conditions.To this purpose an experimental campaign was performed on a natural circulation operating under a gravity field varying in the range between 10–2 g and 1.8 g, withg = 9.81 ms–2. The dynamical behaviour detected during the experiment was used for the validation of a mathematical model, previously validated under terrestrial gravity conditions. Model simulations were found to satisfactorily reproduce the dynamics of the system under variable gravity. This proved the possibility to use the model for the construction of bifurcation diagrams describing the behaviours of natural circulation loops under variations of both the gravitational field and the thermal boundaries.