Computer Modeling of Liquid Droplet Impact on Heat Transfer During Spray Cooling

Author(s):  
R. Panneer Selvam ◽  
Sandya Bhaskara ◽  
Juan C. Balda ◽  
Fred Barlow ◽  
Aicha Elshabini

Spray cooling is a high flux heat removal technique considered for systems dissipating high power within small areas such as advanced lasers. Recently Selvam and Ponnappan (2004 & 2005) identified the importance of modeling heat transfer in a thin liquid film on a hot surface at the micro level and illustrated how this micro level modeling could help to improve the macro level spray cooling. The goal of this research is to advance the theoretical understanding of spray cooling to enable efficient system level hardware designs. Two-phase flow modeling is done using the level set method to identify the interface of vapor and liquid. The modifications made to the incompressible Navier-Stokes equations to consider surface tension and phase change are presented. The equations are solved using the finite difference method. The effect of liquid droplet impact on a 40 μm thick liquid film containing vapor bubble and the consequent heat removal is explained with a sequence of temperature vs. time contours. From that, the importance of fast transient conduction in the liquid film leading to high heat flux in a short time is illustrated. The optimum positioning of the droplet with respect to the vapor bubble for effective heat removal is also systematically investigated. This information is expected to help in proper positioning of the droplet in three-dimensional modeling.

Author(s):  
R. Panneer Selvam ◽  
Joseph Johnston ◽  
Suranjan Sarkar

In this paper, we present an extension of the level set method from 2D into 3D for solving multiphase flow problems using distributed parallel computing. The model solves the incompressible Navier-Stokes equations to study the behavior of a bubble immersed in a thin liquid film at microscale as found in a spray cooling environment. Since modeling all aspects of spray cooling, including nucleation, bubble dynamics, droplet impact, convection and thin film evaporation is very difficult at this time; these phenomena have been divided and studied separately in order to study the heat transfer behavior of each phenomenon individually. We studied the droplet impact effect as seen in spray cooling by our 3D multiphase model in earlier studies. Through the 3D multiphase model this study simulates the dynamics of a nucleating bubble in a thin liquid film that merges with the ambient atmosphere above the film. In this study we did not consider the droplet impact effect to concentrate on the vapor bubble dynamics in thin liquid film and its effect on heat transfer. The effect of convective flow is not considered to keep the 3-D model simple. However the 2D model was modified to simulate the effect that a horizontal flow of constant velocity has on the growth and detachment of a nucleating bubble and discussed in the second part of the paper. This study illustrates the importance of considering the convective flow effect in our 3-D multiphase flow model in future with droplet impact for spray cooling modeling studies.


2009 ◽  
Vol 131 (12) ◽  
Author(s):  
Suranjan Sarkar ◽  
R. Panneer Selvam

Thermal management issues have become a major bottleneck for further miniaturization and increased power consumption of electronics. Power electronics require more increasing use of high heat flux cooling technologies. Spray cooling with phase change has the advantage of large amount of heat transfer from the hot surface of many power electronics. Spray cooling is a complex phenomenon due to the interaction of liquid, vapor, and phase change at small length scale. A good understanding of the underlying physics and the heat removal process in spray cooling through numerical modeling is needed to design efficient spray cooling system. A computational fluid dynamics based 3D multiphase model for spray cooling is developed here in parallel computing environment using multigrid conjugate gradient solver. This model considers the effect of surface tension, gravity, phase change, and viscosity. The level set method is used to capture the movement of the liquid-vapor interface. The governing equations are solved using finite difference method. Spray cooling is studied using this model, where a vapor bubble is growing in a thin liquid film on a hot surface and a droplet is impacting on the thin film. The symmetry boundary condition considered on four sides of the domain effectively represents a large spray made up of multiple equally sized droplets and bubbles and their interaction. Studies have also been performed for different wall superheats in the absence of vapor bubble to compare the effect of two-phase heat transfer compared to single-phase in spray cooling. The computed interface, temperature, and heat flux distributions at different times over the domain are visualized for better understanding of the heat removal mechanism.


2008 ◽  
Author(s):  
Mita Sarkar ◽  
R. Panneer Selvam ◽  
Rengasamy Ponnappan

Spray cooling is a way of efficiently removing the heat from a hot surface and considered for high power system such as advanced lasers. The heat transfer phenomenon in spray cooling is complex in nature because it occurs due to conduction, convection and phase change. The numerical model of spray cooling is done by solving the set of incompressible Navier-Stokes equations using finite difference method. Level set method is used to capture the liquid vapor interface in our multiphase flow model. Our previous 2D model which included single droplet impact on single growing vapor bubble is modified to introduce multiple droplets impact on thin liquid film with multiple growing vapor bubbles. Though the previous model was effective so far to predict the spray cooling phenomena and also the parameters for high heat removal, but the actual spray cooling phenomena consists of multiple droplets impact on multiple growing vapor bubbles at different time instances. To understand the spray cooling further and to represent it more realistically the inclusion of multiple droplets and multiple vapor bubbles is essential. In the present work, an investigation on the effect of latent heat of vaporization of coolant is conducted for the case of a thin liquid film of 44 μm in removing the heat and bubble growth when a liquid spray droplet is impacting. The flow and heat transfer details are presented for multiple droplet impacts on thin liquid film with multiple growing vapor bubbles.


2018 ◽  
Vol 140 (11) ◽  
Author(s):  
Jian-nan Chen ◽  
Rui-na Xu ◽  
Zhen Zhang ◽  
Xue Chen ◽  
Xiao-long Ouyang ◽  
...  

Enhancing spray cooling with surface structures is a common, effective approach for high heat flux thermal management to guarantee the reliability of many high-power, high-speed electronics and to improve the efficiency of new energy systems. However, the fundamental heat transfer enhancement mechanisms are not well understood especially for nanostructures. Here, we fabricated six groups of nanowire arrayed surfaces with various structures and sizes that show for the first time how these nanostructures enhance the spray cooling by improving the surface wettability and the liquid transport to quickly rewet the surface and avoid dry out. These insights into the nanostructure spray cooling heat transfer enhancement mechanisms are combined with microstructure heat transfer mechanism in integrated microstructure and nanostructure hybrid surface that further enhances the spray cooling heat transfer.


Author(s):  
Akira Matsui ◽  
Kazuhisa Yuki ◽  
Hidetoshi Hashizume

Detailed heat transfer characteristics of particle-sintered porous media and metal foams are evaluated to specify the important structural parameters suitable for high heat removal. The porous media used in this experiment are particle-sintered porous media made of bronze and SUS316L, and metal foams made of copper and nickel. Cooling water flows into the porous medium opposite to heat flux input loaded by a plasma arcjet. The result indicates that the bronze-particle porous medium of 100μm in pore size shows the highest performance and achieves heat transfer coefficient of 0.035MW/m2K at inlet heat flux 4.6MW/m2. Compared with the heat transfer performance of copper fiber-sintered porous media, the bronze particlesintered ones give lower heat transfer coefficient. However, the stable cooling conditions that the heat transfer coefficient does not depend on the flow velocity, were confirmed even at heat flux of 4.6MW/m2 in case of the bronze particle-sintered media, while not in the case of the copper-fiber sintered media. This signifies the possibility that the bronze-particle sintered media enable much higher heat flux removal of over 10MW/m2, which could be caused by higher permeability of the particle-sintered pore structures. Porous media with high permeability provide high performance of vapor evacuation, which leads to more stable heat removal even under extremely high heat flux. On the other hand, the heat transfer coefficient of the metal foams becomes lower because of the lower capillary and fin effects caused by too high porosity and low effective thermal conductivity. It is concluded that the pore structure having high performance of vapor evacuation as well as the high capillary and high fin effects is appropriate for extremely high heat flux removal of over 10MW/m2.


Author(s):  
Andres Diaz ◽  
Alfonso Ortega ◽  
Ryan Anderson

Previous studies, most of them experimental, reveal that the cooling effectiveness of a water drop impinging on a heated surface depends on the wall temperature, droplet shape and velocity. All previous studies focus on the behavior of a droplet falling in a quiescent environment, such as still air. Evidence in the literature also shows that gas assisted droplet sprays, in which a gas phase propels the droplets, are more efficient in heat removal than sprays consisting of droplets alone. It is conjectured that this is due to an increase in the maximum droplet spreading diameter upon impact, a thinner film, and consequently an increase in the overall heat transfer coefficient. Recent experiments in the author’s group [1, 2] show that the carrier gas jet strongly influences droplet spreading dynamics by imposing normal and shear forces on the liquid surface. The heat transfer is greatly augmented in the process, compared to a free falling droplet. To date, there has been no fundamental investigation of the physics of gas assisted spray cooling. To begin to understand the complicated process, this paper reports on a fundamental problem of a single liquid droplet that impinges on a heated surface. This paper contributes a numerical investigation of the problem using the volume of fluid (VOF) technique to capture droplet spreading dynamics and heat transfer in a single drop event. The fluid mechanics is investigated and compared to the experimental data. The greatest uncertainty in the simulation is in the specification of the contact angle of the advancing or receding liquid front, and in capturing the onset of the three-dimensional fingering phenomena.


Author(s):  
Beni Mehrdad Shahmohammadi ◽  
Shangzhen Xie ◽  
Jiyun Zhao

The spray cooling and heat removal efficiency is one of the important aspect of nuclear thermalhydraulics and safety, especially for passive containment cooling after severe accidents. In order to design and optimize these systems effectively, computer modelling of the underlying mechanism of the liquid drop interaction with the hot solid surface would be necessary. Therefore, completeness, accuracy and reliability of the models that are being used in such sensitive areas are vital to the society and environment. Furthermore, the current powerful computer resources need to be fully exploited, so that the precision and the accuracy of the obtained computational results would be further enhanced. Nowadays, Volume-Of-Fluid (VOF) method is widely used in simulating the droplet dynamics, however these models provide estimations that are different in certain extents compare to the experimental results. In present work, we have used the level-set method to study the droplet dynamics and heat removal when the water droplet impact on the surface with different morphologies. The developed model which is based on the finite element method (FEM) has been benchmarked with previously performed experiments regarding the droplet bouncing on a flat hydrophobic surface; these estimations were in a good agreement with the previously published results. Moreover, hot solid surfaces with presence of micro-pillar has been considered to perform sensitivity study for different sizes of the micro-pillars and water droplets. In addition, it has been found that the heat transfer and droplet dynamic behavior would significantly vary in scenarios when the micro-pillars are presents in compare to a flat solid surface; it is observed that a better droplet spreading can be obtained with optimal size of micro-pillars that are present underneath of the droplet axial trajectory. The present study and the model would add valuable information to the field of heat transfer in aspect of spray cooling by investigating the feasibility of using the level-set method for a better estimation of fluid and heat transfer related results.


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