Final Report on Safety Regulation and Products Standard of Heat Pipe

Recently, the size of heat exchanger of heat pipe type has been enlarged and a single heat pipe is now subject to the Japanese domestic pressure vessel code. To ensure the safe operation of heat pipe and to establish products standards, the engineering group organized by Japan Association for Heat Pipes has been discussing the safety problem of a heat pipe, especially in relation to the existing pressure vessel regulations.
Two years ago, several members of our engineering group made a brief review of their efforts at a workshop in the Third International Heat Pipe Symposium held at Tsukuba. Due to the growing interests in the safety problem, a summary of our final report will be described in this paper.