I can’t find the link anymore. It came up on google when i was searching for other stuff. It was from an engineering product website. Though I doubt the engineering integrity of the site as the marketing guys might have got to it.
It said heatpipes are very good but there are problems with them apparently. The cause of them mucking up seems to be residue due to the phase change. The effect happens of the order of years but after about 5 years or so there could be problems.
FEA = finite element analysis. Which is splitting an object up into blocks and then analysing the forces on each block using elementary procedures. This (well its a version of FEA called finite volume analysis where you measure the flow in and out of a block) can be used in full 3d to model heatpipes but the model is computationally expensive (that high end X2 is not leet enough) and presents problems. This is because the flow is two phase (gas and fluid) and highly temperature and energy dependent. The FEA program mentioned above uses the 1d assumption. Which uses an empirical / analytical method to calculate how a heat pipe would behave over a short section (where what defines short is actually rather complicated). It then uses many of these sections to model the heat transfer of the pipe to a solid section (ie a heatsink model).
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