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Piston design that incorporates the heat pipe cooling technology may provide a new approach for piston-temperature control. A simulated piston crown that contains an annular reciprocating heat pipe is developed to investigate the effect of heat pipe cooling on the piston crown temperature distribution. For this purpose, a reciprocating engine testing apparatus is designed and constructed. The experimental study focuses on the static and dynamic operational characteristics of the heat pipe and its cooling effect on the simulated piston crown under different power input. The experiment results indicate that a piston crown incorporating a heat pipe can yield a uniform temperature distribution in the ring-bank area of the piston crown. The testing results would also provide the needed information for a possible piston design that incorporates the heat pipe cooling technology for improved thermal-tribological performance.

The first part of this series of papers reports the development of a simulated piston crown with an annular reciprocating heat pipe and the investigation on the effect of heat-pipe cooling on the piston-crown temperature distribution. This paper presents the modeling of the simulated piston crown with the finite-element method and the analysis of its thermal performance. The heat-transfer coefficient with respect to the reciprocal environment of the experimental apparatus and the effective thermal conductance of the annular heat pipe are determined by correlating the modeling with the experimental measurements. The numerical modeling agrees well with the experimental results. The analyses indicate that the heat-pipe cooling technology can provide an effective means for piston temperature control.