Heat Pipe Wick Library

Sintered + Screen + Grooved Wick Specifications

The Heat Pipe Wick Library is an engineering specification encompassing four wick configurations—sintered powder, wire screen, axial grooves, and composite structures—that passively circulate working fluids across diverse operating temperature ranges. Fabricated from sintered copper, molybdenum, or nickel powders, stainless wire screens, or grooved walls, each design balances capillary pumping pressure against thermal conductivity. Managing thermal loads on the Moon requires completely passive heat transport capable of surviving long-duration deployment, demanding sealed wick architectures with a 100-year operational lifetime and a 1,000,000-hour mean time between failures, alongside standardized specifications enabling reproduction from in-situ smelted metals.

Library of heat-pipe wick designs (sintered, screen, grooved) optimised for different working fluids and operating temperature ranges.