Prediction of Refrigerant Flow Boiling Hysteresis With an Augmented Separated-Flow Model

Thermal management is essential to compact devices particularly for high heat flux removal applications. As a popular thermal technology, refrigeration cooling is able to provide relatively high heat flux removal capability and uniform device surface temperature. In a refrigeration cycle, the performance of evaporator is extremely important to the overall cooling efficiency. In a well-designed evaporator, effective flow boiling heat transfer can be achieved whereas the critical heat flux (CHF) or dryout condition must be avoided. Otherwise the device surface temperature would rise significantly and cause device burnout due to the poor heat transfer performance of film boiling. In order to evaluate the influence of varying imposed heat fluxes, saturated flow boiling in the evaporator is systematically studied. The complete refrigerant flow boiling hysteresis between the imposed heat flux and the exit wall superheat is characterized. Upon the occurrence of CHF at the evaporator wall exit, the wall heat flux redistributes due to the axial wall heat conduction, which drives the dryout point to propagate upstream in the evaporator. As a result, a significant amount of thermal energy is stored in the evaporator wall. While the heat flux starts decreasing, the dryout point moves downstream and closer to the exit. The stored heat in the wall dissipates slowly and leads to the delay in rewetting or quenching, which is the key to understand and predict the flow boiling hysteresis. In order to reveal the transient heat releasing mechanism, an augmented separated-flow model is developed to predict the moving rewetting point and minimum heat flux at the evaporator exit, and the model predictions are further validated by experimental data from a refrigeration cooling testbed.

Pre- and Post-Critical Heat Flux Analyses in a Saturated Refrigerant Flow Boiling System

Vapor compression refrigeration (VCR) cooling has been identified as a promising solution to ensure the low-temperature sustainable operation of photonics, avionics and electronics in extreme hot weather. With the inherent benefits of saturated flow boiling in a direct VCR cooling cycle, uniform low surface temperature and low solid/liquid thermal resistances can be achieved. However, flow boiling heat transfer performance is limited by the relatively low critical heat flux (CHF) condition because the evaporator inlet flow is already a liquid/vapor mixture. Moreover, for the aforementioned applications, the dissipated heat loads are usually subject to large and transient changes, which could easily cause the evaporating flow to exceed the CHF point. Therefore, it is important to characterize boiling heat transfer in transient VCR evaporators under both pre-CHF and post-CHF conditions. Comprehensive experimental data are reported in this paper to describe the complete forced convection boiling hysteresis at the evaporator exit. Several well-known boiling heat transfer correlations and flow pattern criteria are used to help understand the physics of the hysteresis. An empirical model is developed to reveal the unstable nature of transition flow boiling dynamics. A probability distribution function model is further proposed to predict the droplet size in mist flow and vapor core of annular flow. This study provides more design and operating guidelines for the application of saturated flow boiling systems in renewable power generation and electronics/photonics/avionics cooling industries.

Pool Boiling of FC-72: A Comparison of Two Thin Porous Coatings on Heat Transfer Enhancement

The present research is an experimental study of pool boiling behavior of surfaces coated with thin porous layers. The fluid employed is FC-72, a highly-wetting dielectric perfluorocarbon with zero ozone-depletion potential (ODP). This creates the potential for electronic cooling application. Different surfaces, including the super-smooth surface (SSS), the High Flux™ surface (HFS), and the new electrochemical deposition surface (EDS) were tested, and the test results were compared. Both subcooled and saturated fluid pools were studied. The boiling hysteresis phenomenon was studied for these surfaces under different boiling conditions, which include the fluid bulk temperature and the non-boiling immersion time. Results of the study showed that the porous-coated surface dramatically enhanced the nucleate boiling heat transfer performance. The boiling hysteresis phenomenon is more prominent on porous-coated surfaces than on smooth surfaces, and subcooling can deteriorate this phenomenon.

Subcooled Boiling of Surfactant Solutions

During subcooled boiling of pure water and water with cationic surfactants, the motion of bubbles and the temperature of the heated surface were recorded by both a high-speed video camera and an infrared radiometer. The results show that the bubble behavior and the heat transfer mechanism for the surfactant are quite different from those of clear water. Bubbles formed in Habon G solutions were much smaller man those in water and the surface was covered with them faster. Boiling hysteresis is found for degraded solutions. Dependencies of heat transfer coefficient for various solutions were obtained and compared. The boiling curves of surfactant are quite different from the boiling curve of pure water. Experimental results demonstrate that the heat transfer coefficient of the boiling process can be enhanced considerably by the addition of a small amount of Habon G. The experiments show that the limitations of the ER technique with respect to frequency response are outweighed by its unique capacity to measure wall temperature distribution with high spatial resolution over an area encompassing many nucleation sites and over long periods.