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Answer: The best way we can put grooves in our cold plates of aluminum is to make them in our machine shop. We can create the grooves in the aluminum plate through the Mill machine (or any other applicable machine we have). Because the overall design premise is to have heat pipes within the grooves of the cold plate, the angle of the pipes should be minimal (below 10 degrees) to provide the battery box with enough thermal conductivity benefits and also be able to fit into manufacturable within the grooves. The most important element is to have the condenser at or above the evaporator, which would mean looking into having the heat pipes vertically oriented. Assuming we are using copper heat pipes with water inside, we can most likely just use a pipe bender to bend the pipes to fit within the grooves. This method of bending should work with round sintered heat pipes (what we will most likely use). While using the pipe bender, it may be necessary to also anneal the heat pipes (heating them up) so that they can be easier to bend. When doing this, the working liquid should not be inside the pipe and we need to be careful of the copper hardening, which can make the heat pipe explode (because of all the working chemicals inside). It is important to note that increasing the angle of our bends will gradually reduce the thermal conductivity of the heat pipes. However, considering our application where the heat pipes will not need much of an angle within the heating/dissipating plates, this should not be much of an issue.
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