Shape of a Vapor Stem During Nucleate Boiling of Saturated Liquids

1995 ◽  
Vol 117 (2) ◽  
pp. 394-401 ◽  
Author(s):  
J. H. Lay ◽  
V. K. Dhir

The transport processes occurring in an evaporating two-dimensional vapor stem formed during saturated nucleate boiling on a heated surface are modeled and analyzed numerically. From the heater surface heat is conducted into the liquid macro/microthermal layer surrounding the vapor stems and is utilized in evaporation at the stationary liquid–vapor interface. A balance between forces due to curvature of the interface, disjoining pressure, hydrostatic head, and liquid drag determines the shape of the interface. The kinetic theory and the extended Clausius–Clapeyron equation are used to calculate the evaporative heat flux across the liquid–vapor interface. The vapor stem shape calculated by solving a fourth-order nonlinear ordinary differential equation resembles a cup with a flat bottom. For a given wall superheat, several metastable states of the vapor stem between a minimum and maximum diameter are found to be possible. The effect of wall superheat on the shape of the vapor stem is parametrically analyzed and compared with limited data reported in the literature.

2006 ◽  
Vol 129 (2) ◽  
pp. 114-123
Author(s):  
Chen-li Sun ◽  
Van P. Carey

In this study, boiling experiments were conducted with 2-propanol/water mixtures in confined gap geometry under various levels of gravity. The temperature field created within the parallel plate gap resulted in evaporation over the portion of the vapor-liquid interface of the bubble near the heated surface, and condensation near the cold surface. Full boiling curves were obtained and two boiling regimes—nucleate boiling and pseudofilm boiling—and the transition condition, the critical heat flux (CHF), were identified. The observations indicated that the presence of the gap geometry pushed the nucleate boiling regime to a lower superheated temperature range, resulting in correspondingly lower heat flux. With further increases of wall superheat, the vapor generated by the boiling process was trapped in the gap to blanket the heated surface. This caused premature occurrence of CHF conditions and deterioration of heat transfer in the pseudo-film boiling regime. The influence of the confined space was particularly significant when greater Marangoni forces were present under reduced gravity conditions. The CHF value of x (molar fraction)=0.025, which corresponded to weaker Marangoni forces, was found to be greater than that of x=0.015 with a 6.4mm gap.


2010 ◽  
Vol 132 (6) ◽  
Author(s):  
Hyungdae Kim ◽  
Ho Seon Ahn ◽  
Moo Hwan Kim

The pool boiling characteristics of water-based nanofluids with alumina and titania nanoparticles of 0.01 vol % were investigated on a thermally heated disk heater at saturated temperature and atmospheric pressure. The results confirmed the findings of previous studies that nanofluids can significantly enhance the critical heat flux (CHF), resulting in a large increase in the wall superheat. It was found that some nanoparticles deposit on the heater surface during nucleate boiling, and the surface modification due to the deposition results in the same magnitude of CHF enhancement in pure water as for nanofluids. Subsequent to the boiling experiments, the interfacial properties of the heater surfaces were examined using dynamic wetting of an evaporating water droplet. As the surface temperature increased, the evaporating meniscus on the clean surface suddenly receded toward the liquid due to the evaporation recoil force on the liquid-vapor interface, but the nanoparticle-fouled surface exhibited stable wetting of the liquid meniscus even at a remarkably higher wall superheat. The heat flux gain attainable due to the improved wetting of the evaporating meniscus on the fouled surface showed good agreement with the CHF enhancement during nanofluid boiling. It is supposed that the nanoparticle layer increases the stability of the evaporating microlayer underneath a bubble growing on a heated surface and thus the irreversible growth of a hot/dry spot is inhibited even at a high wall superheat, resulting in the CHF enhancement observed when boiling nanofluids.


Author(s):  
Tomio Okawa ◽  
Takahito Kamiya

It is known that dispersion of a small amount of nanometer-sized particles in liquid can cause substantial improvement of the critical heat flux in pool boiling. Nanofluids (colloidal suspensions of nanoparticles in a base fluid) may therefore be used as the coolant in industrial applications in which high-heat-flux removal is needed. If it is supposed that the deposition of nanoparticles onto the heated surface during nucleate boiling is the main cause of the CHF enhancement in nanofluids, a certain time period is considered to be necessary for the CHF to be improved. In view of this, preliminary experiments were performed in the present work to investigate the time scale of CHF improvement; here, distilled water was used as a base fluid, and TiO2 and copper were selected as the materials of nanoparticles and heated surface, respectively. Under a particular experimental conditions of nanoparticle concentration and nucleate boiling heat flux (40 mg/l and 500 kW/m2), an approximate time scale of CHF improvement was 10 min; this value might not be negligibly short in some nanofluid applications. The measured time-variations of the wall superheat during the nucleate boiling in nanofluid suggested that longer time periods are required for the CHF enhancement at lower heat fluxes and lower nanoparticle concentrations. In particular, 40 min was not sufficient for the wall superheat to reach a steady-state value at the lowest nanoparticle concentration of tested in this work (9 mg/l).


Author(s):  
Yang Luo ◽  
Jingzhi Zhang ◽  
Wei Li ◽  
Zhengjiang Zhang ◽  
Jincai Du ◽  
...  

In the study numerical simulations are performed to investigate the saturated fluid flow through a two dimensional microchannel (1000μm×200μm, with a superheated bottom wall) by building a comprehensive physical method and updating the standard solver in the OpenFOAM software package. On basis of previous numerical study, most of the numerical methods for the micro-scale flow boiling emphasizes the mass transfer and interfacial heat exchange. Simultaneously, geometric reconstruction technology for liquid-vapor interface is widely used, which evidently captures the interfacial boundary characteristic accurately but costs lots of computational resources. In the present study, the temperature recovery model is adopted to maintain the liquid-vapor interface temperature, and an interface-cell searching algorithm is added into the model, while the geometric interface reconstruction technology is abandoned. For the validation of the new codes developed in OpenFOAM, 1-d Stefan Problem and the experimental results of Mukherjee are both utilized to compare with our simulation results. The growth process of a single bubble in the laminar flow regime is studied in order to explore the underlying mechanism of flow boiling in microchannels. The qualitative investigation for effects of wall superheat, Reynolds number, contact angle and surface tension on heat transfer are comprehensively discussed. In general, heat flux of the bottom wall increases because of the motion of liquid-vapor interface. Wall superheat determines the rate of bubble growth on the heated wall, which is roughly proportional to wall heat flux due to the Fourier’s Law. The distribution of velocity and temperature fields in the channel refresh progressively with increasing inflow Reynolds number, which speeds up the evolution of interface position and augments the wall heat flux significantly. Furthermore, the area of thin liquid film between the wall and the bubble is enlarged by reducing the contact angle, thus augmenting the wall heat flux by several times compared with the single phase microchannel flow. However, surface tension and gravitational acceleration are found to be negligible in the present study.


Author(s):  
Chen-Li Sun ◽  
Van P. Carey

In this study, boiling experiments were conducted with 2-propanol/water mixtures in confined gap geometry under various levels of gravity. The temperature field created within the parallel plate gap resulted in evaporation over the portion of the vapor-liquid interface of the bubble near the heated surface, and condensation near the cold surface. Full boiling curves were obtained and two boiling regimes — nucleate boiling and pseudo film boiling, the transition condition, and the critical heat flux (CHF), were identified. The observations indicate that the presence of the gap geometry pushed the nucleate boiling regime to a lower superheated temperature range and resulted in correspondingly lower heat flux. With further increases of wall superheat, the vapor generated by the boiling process was trapped in the gap and blanketed the heated surface. This caused premature occurrence of CHF conditions and deterioration of heat transfer in the pseudo film boiling regime. The influence of the confined space was particularly significant when greater Marangoni forces were present at reduced gravity conditions. The value of the CHF for x = 0.025, which corresponded to weaker Marangoni forces, was found to be greater than that of x = 0.015 with a 6.35 mm gap.


Author(s):  
M. K. Akbar ◽  
R. C. Chedester ◽  
S. M. Ghiaasiaan

Bubble nucleation and growth in microsystems, and in microchannels supporting subcooled nucleate boiling, occur within liquids with extremely large temperature gradients. Non-uniform bubble-liquid interfacial temperatures may occur, leading to important thermocapillary effects. This analytical investigation is an attempt to demonstrate the potential impact of the thermocapillary effects on heterogeneously-generated micro-bubbles. Quasi-steady bubbles occupying heated microtubes are first modeled. It is shown that the temperature of the liquid-vapor interphase in these bubbles can be non-uniform. This temperature non-uniformity increases with increasing the heat transfer rate, and depends on the microtube size. A method for the prediction of liquid-vapor interphase geometry resulting from non-uniform bubble surface temperature is developed. It is shown that the aforementioned bubbles can be distorted from spherical geometry rather significantly. Quasi-steady bubbles attached to a heated microchannel surface supporting subcooled nucleate boiling are also modeled. The bubble-liquid interfacial temperature distribution is estimated based on assuming equal evaporation and condensation mass fluxes at the bubble base and top, and using the simple gas kinetic theory methods. The result shows that the thermocapillary effect tends to slightly distort and elongate the bubbles in the direction perpendicular to the heated surface, and leads to a thermocapillary force that resists bubble detachment. The geometric distortion of the bubble leads to an increase in drag force in comparison with a chopped-spherical bubble with equal volume.


2001 ◽  
Author(s):  
Qiang Bai ◽  
V. K. Dhir

Abstract Deposition of boron on the fuel rod cladding during boiling of water containing boron can depress the neutron flux and lead to a decrease in nuclear reactor power output. There is practically little precise information on the temperature field, the gradients of chemical concentration and deposition of boron on the cladding surface. The objective of the present work is to simulate the nucleate boiling process along with velocity, temperature and concentration fields of aqueous boron in the vicinity of the cladding of a fuel rod. As a first step in solving the complete problem, two-dimensional numerical simulation of a bubble growth on a horizontal surface is considered. A finite difference scheme is used to solve the equations governing conservation of mass, momentum, energy and species concentration. The calculation domain is divided into macro and micro regions. In macro-region, the governing equations are used to calculate the distributions of velocity, temperature, and concentration. The Level Set method is used to capture the evolving liquid-vapor interface. For micro-region, lubrication theory is used, which includes the disjoining pressure in the thin liquid film. The solutions for micro-region and macro-region are matched at the outer edge of the micro-layer. A dilute aqueous Boron solution is considered in the simulation. From numerical simulations, the dynamic change in concentration distribution of boron during the bubble growth shows that the precipitation of boron can occur near the advancing and receding liquid-vapor interface when the ambient boron concentration level is 0.003.


Author(s):  
Didier Jamet ◽  
Olivier Lebaigue ◽  
Jean-Marc Delhaye ◽  
N. Coutris

2003 ◽  
Vol 125 (1) ◽  
pp. 103-109 ◽  
Author(s):  
C. Ramaswamy ◽  
Y. Joshi ◽  
W. Nakayama ◽  
W. B. Johnson

The current study involves two-phase cooling from enhanced structures whose dimensions have been changed systematically using microfabrication techniques. The aim is to optimize the dimensions to maximize the heat transfer. The enhanced structure used in this study consists of a stacked network of interconnecting channels making it highly porous. The effect of varying the pore size, pitch and height on the boiling performance was studied, with fluorocarbon FC-72 as the working fluid. While most of the previous studies on the mechanism of enhanced nucleate boiling have focused on a small range of wall superheats (0–4 K), the present study covers a wider range (as high as 30 K). A larger pore and smaller pitch resulted in higher heat dissipation at all heat fluxes. The effect of stacking multiple layers showed a proportional increase in heat dissipation (with additional layers) in a certain range of wall superheat values only. In the wall superheat range 8–13 K, no appreciable difference was observed between a single layer structure and a three layer structure. A fin effect combined with change in the boiling phenomenon within the sub-surface layers is proposed to explain this effect.


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