Flow boiling in vertical small to micro scale tubes

Abstract

The growing demand for the development of efficient miniature cooling systems has led to stimulating numerous investigations on two-phase flow boiling in small to microscale tubes. Because of the variation in properties of synthetic cooling fluids, this causes an inaccuracy of existing flow boiling prediction models or correlations in the literature to interpolate or extrapolate the two-phase flow boiling heat transfer and pressure drop. The purpose of this investigation was to study experimentally the parametric aspects of flow boiling characteristics inside vertical stainless-steel tubes with four different internal diameters (1.1, 2.01, 2.88 and 4.26 mm). The R245fa (1,1,1,3,3-pentafluoropropane, HFC-245fa) was used as working fluid. The experiments were carried out under a system pressure range of 185 – 310 kPa (which correspond to a saturation temperature range of 31 – 46 °C), mass flux range of 200 – 500 kg/m²s, heat flux range of 3 – 188.5 kW/m², vapour quality up to the onset of dryout and 5 K inlet subcooling. Flow pattern visualisations, two-phase pressure drops and saturated flow boiling heat transfer coefficients were presented. The experimental data of R134a employed for comparison is acquired from the previous studies of Huo et al. (2007), Shiferaw et al. (2011) and Mahmoud et al. (2014a). These studies were carried out in the same experimental facility and under the similar operating conditions. The Two-phase flow regimes inside four tubes were visualised in a borosilicate glass tube located at the heated section outlet to capture the dominant flow patterns which assist to elucidate the heat transfer results. The flow boiling visualisation was recorded by a high-speed camera with experiments of increasing and decreasing heat flux. The four observed flow regimes are identified as bubbly flow, slug flow, churn flow and annular flow. In increasing heat flux experiments, the churn and annular flows were only the dominant patterns in all four tubes. The slug flow was often discerned at lower mass flux except for the tube of 1.1 mm where it was not observed at all. This is contrary to decreasing heat flux experiments where all flow patterns including the bubble flow were observed in all the tubes. This shows a strong impact of hysteresis, which is a result of nucleation sites remained active as the heat flux is reduced. The flow patterns and transition boundaries for R245fa are affected by mass flux, system pressure, and tube diameter. The vapour quality corresponding to flow pattern transition boundary tends to decrease with increasing mass flux and tends to increase with increasing system pressure and decreasing tube diameter. Except for the bubbly-slug boundary, its vapour quality decreases with decreasing tube diameter. The experimental flow pattern maps of R245fa were fairly predicted with the predictive models developed for mini- and micro-channels by Tibiriçá et al. (2017). The two-phase pressure drop of R245fa is affected by mass flux, heat flux, system pressure, tube diameter and surface topography. The two-phase pressure drop increases with increasing mass flux and heat flux (vapour quality) and decreases with increasing system pressure and tube diameter. The two-phase pressure drop of the coated tube is higher than that of the uncoated tube. This is attributed to the coated tube having a higher surface roughness compared to the uncoated tube. The comparison between R245fa and R134a shows that the measured two-phase pressure drop of R245fa is dramatically higher than that of R134a. This arises from the difference in physical properties of the two fluids. The experimental data of two-phase pressure drop for 4.26 mm tube were reasonably predicted by Müller-Steinhagen and Heck (1986) correlation. Further, the experimental data of 2.88 mm and 2.01 mm tubes were well predicted by Chisholm (1973a), and Kim and Mudawar (2013), respectively. The experimental data of 1.1 mm tube were not well predicted by any of the selected predictive methods. The local heat transfer coefficient of all tubes increases with increasing heat flux for low and intermediate vapour qualities. After this vapour qualities, the heat flux effect diminishes. Then, the local heat transfer coefficient increased slightly with vapour quality, especially for higher heat flux near the outlet of the tube. However, the dryout inception in the 1.1 mm tube occurs after the intermediate vapour quality value and expands along the high vapour quality region. The behaviour of the local heat transfer coefficients of 1.1 and 2.88 mm tube is slightly dependent on the mass flux and vapour quality. Contrarily, there is insignificant effect of mass flux along 2.01 and 4.26 mm tube. This gives an indication of the contribution of nucleate boiling in the heat transfer process at lower and medium heat fluxes and nucleate boiling plus convective evaporation at higher heat fluxes near the tube outlet. Further, the local heat transfer coefficient increases as the system pressure increases. The tube diameter has a strong influence on the enhancement of local heat transfer coefficient. The enhancement in average heat transfer coefficient approaches 83% when the tube diameter is reduced from 4.26 to 1.1 mm. The trend of the local heat transfer coefficient of R134a was almost similar to that of R245fa with the exception of local dryout. The average heat transfer coefficient of R134a is about 106-151% larger than that of R245fa for the operational range studied. The dominant heat transfer mechanism is also represented by nucleate boiling for both fluids, particularly for 4.26 mm tube tested in this study. Also, the average heat transfer coefficient was enhanced by 33% when the inner tube surface coated with a copper coating. Finally, the correlation of Fang et al. (2017) predicted all experimental data for the four tubes with fair and similar accuracy.