Mechanistic Prediction of Nucleate Boiling Heat Transfer-Achievable or a Hopeless Task?

By Vijay K. Dhir. 2006

218 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Over the last half of the twentieth century, a number of purely empirical and mechanism-based correlations have been developed for pool nucleate boiling. Empirical correlations differ from each other substantially with respect to the functional dependence of heat flux on fluid and surface properties, including gravity. The mechanism-based correlations require knowledge of the number density of active sites, bubble diameter at departure, and bubble-release frequency. However, because of the complex nature of the subprocesses involved, it has not been possible to develop comprehensive models or correlations for these parameters. This, in turn, has led to the pessimistic view that mechanistic prediction of nucleate boiling is a hopeless task. However, there is an alternative to the past approaches¯complete numerical simulation of the boiling process. Value of this approach for bubble dynamics and associated heat transfer is shown through excellent agreement of predictions with data obtained on microfabricated surfaces on which active nucleation sites can be controlled.

Subfields: Computational Mechanics, Mechanical Engineering

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/d396bc9c6d53c80cbb92edec280d35b2e25f10d9

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In Computational Mechanics

In Mechanical Engineering

Citations in the corpus

Numerical simulation of nucleate boiling on a horizontal surface at high heat fluxes (2008, background): “A number of empirical and mechanism-based correlations for nucleate boiling have been reported in the literature, as reviewed in detail by Dhir [2, 3 ].”
Study of bubble growth in water pool boiling through synchronized, infrared thermometry and high-speed video (2010, background): “We shall note, in passing, that surface temperature data of the type shown in Figure 4 could prove extremely valuable for validation of numerical models of boiling, as more and more researchers are attempting CFD simulations of the bubble nucleation process ([10], [11], [12]).”
Boiling heat transfer on superhydrophilic, superhydrophobic, and superbiphilic surfaces (2012, background): “This density depends on the geometry and chemistr y of the surface [20, 39], and is”
Single bubble dynamics on a superhydrophilic surface with artificial nucleation sites (2011, methodology): “Past experimental studies of single or quasi-single bubble dynamics used well-wetting liquids, such as FC-72, or added surfactants to investigate the effects of surface wettability on bubble dynamics [1,8] and pool boiling heat transfer [9,10].”