Experimental Study of Flow Boiling in Microchannel

Author(s):  
S. G. Singh ◽  
S. P. Duttagupta ◽  
A. M. Kulkarni ◽  
B. P. Puranik ◽  
A. Agrawal

With the reduction in size of electronic devices, the problem of efficient cooling is becoming more and more severe. Boiling heat transfer in microchannels is fast emerging as a promising solution to the problem. In the present work, microchannels were fabricated on a silicon wafer. A chrome-gold micro-heater was integrated and characterized on the other side of the wafer. The change in resistance of the micro-heater in the temperature range of 20 °C – 120 °C was found to be within 10%. Deionized water was used as working fluid in microchannel. The single-phase pressure drop across the microchannel was found to increase linearly with increasing flow rate in confirmation with conventional laminar flow theory. Also, the pressure drop decreases with an increase in heat input due to a reduction in viscosity. The study was extended to two phase flow with flow rate and heat flux as the control parameters. The onset of two phase flow, at a given heat flux, with a decrease in flow rate, can be identified by the departure of linear pressure drop to non-linearity; this point was also confirmed through visual observation. In two-phase region of flow, pressure drop was found to increase initially, passes through a maximum and then decreases, with a decrease in flow rate. The experiments are performed for several heat fluxes. Both the onset of two phase and maximum pressure drop in the two phase region shifts to higher flow rates with an increase in heat input. Such detailed experimental results seem to be missing from the literature and are expected to be useful for modeling of boiling heat transfer in microchannels. Another pertinent observation is presence of instability in two-phase flow. It was found that at higher flow rate and heat flux instability in two-phase flow was more. An attempt to record these instabilities was made and preliminary data on their frequency will be presented. This study may help to choose suitable operating conditions for a microchannel heat sink for use in electronics cooling.

Author(s):  
Yasuo Koizumi ◽  
Hiroyasu Ohtake ◽  
Ken Sato

Flow and the heat transfer characteristics of boiling two-phase flow of water in flat mini-rectangular-channels were examined. The cross-sections tested were 1.0×10 to 0.2×10 mm and the flow channel length was 250 mm. Single phase flow pressure drop was well expressed by the method for the usual size in the present experimental range. Boiling heat transfer of 0.5 mm high and 10 mm wide cross section was similar to that of the usual size. However, that 0.2 mm high and 10 mm wide cross section was a little different from that of the usual size. An increase in the heat flux after the onset of nucleate boiling on the boiling curve is milder than that of the usual size. Thus, the critical heat flux was lower than that of the usual size. Flow patterns observed in the present experiments were a little different from the Baker flow pattern chart. Consistent agreement was not obtained between the present results of the two-phase flow pressure drop and predictions by the methods for the usual size and also for a mini tube. Subcooled boiling was observed widely in the test section. This made it difficult to determine the local conditions such as quality that was necessary to calculate the Lockhart-Martinelli parameter for the two-phase flow pressure drop prediction.


Kerntechnik ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 86 (5) ◽  
pp. 365-374
Author(s):  
A. M. Refaey ◽  
S. Elnaggar ◽  
S. H. Abdel-Latif ◽  
A. Hamza

Abstract The nucleate boiling regime and two-phase flow are greater importance to the safety analysis of nuclear reactors. In this study, the boiling heat transfer in nuclear reactor is numerical investigated. The computational fluid dynamics (CFD) code, ANSYS Fluent 17.2 is used and the boiling model is employed. The numerical predictions obtained are compared with the experimental data reported by A. Hamza et al. [9]. An experimental test rig is designed and constructed to investigate the effect of cooling water chemistry control and the material of heater surface. CFD software, allows the detailed analysis of the two-phase flow and heat transfer. In this paper, we evaluate the accuracy of the boiling model implemented in the ANSYS Fluent code. This model is based on the heat flux partitioning approach and accommodates the heat flux due to single-phase convection, quenching and evaporation. The validation carried out of surfactant fluid/vapor two-phase flow inside the 2-D cylindrical boiling vessel. A heated horizontal pipe with stainless steel, Aluminum, and Zircalloy surface materials are used to numerically predict the field temperature and void fraction. Different surfactant concentrations ranging from 0, (pure water) to 1500 ppm, and heat fluxes ranging from 31 to 110 kW/m2 are used. The results of the predicted model depict that the addition of SDS Surfactant and increasing the heat flux improves the coefficient of boiling heat transfer for a given concentration. Also, it was found that the increasing of the concentration of aqueous surfactant solution increases the pool boiling heat transfer coefficient. The aqueous surfactant solution SDS improved the heat transfer coefficient of Aluminum, Zircalloy and stainless steel surface materials by 135%.138% and 120% respectively. The results of the numerical model are nearly in agreement with that measured in experimental.


Author(s):  
Junnosuke Okajima ◽  
Shigenao Maruyama ◽  
Hiroki Takeda ◽  
Atsuki Komiya ◽  
Sangkwon Jeong

This paper describes a novel cooling system to be applied in cryosurgery. An ultrafine cryoprobe has been developed to treat small lesions which cannot be treated by conventional cryoprobes. The main problem of the ultrafine cryoprobe is the reduction of the heat transfer rate by the small flow rate due to the large pressure drop in a microchannel and the large ratio of the surface area to the volume. In order to overcome these problems, we utilized boiling heat transfer in a microchannel as the heat transfer mechanism in the ultrafine cryoprobe. The objectives of this paper are to develop an ultrafine cryoprobe and evaluate its cooling characteristics. The ultrafine cryoprobe has a co-axial double tube structure which consists of inner and outer stainless steel tubes. The outer and inner diameters of the outer tube are 0.55mm and 0.3mm, respectively. The outer and inner diameters of the inner tube are 0.15mm and 0.07mm, respectively. The inner tube serves as a capillary tube to change the refrigerant from liquid state to two-phase flow. Furthermore, two-phase flow passes through the annular passage between the inner and out tube. The hydraulic diameter of the annular passage is 0.15mm. Furthermore, HFC-23 (Boiling point is −82.1°C at 1atm) is used as the refrigerants. The temperature of the ultrafine cryoprobe was measured. The lowest temperatures were −45°C in the insulated condition and −35°C in the agar at 37°C (which simulates in vivo condition). Furthermore, the frozen region which is generated around the ultrafine cryoprobe was measured 5mm from the tip of cryoprobe at 120s, and resulted to be 3mm in diameter. Moreover, the change of the refrigerant state is calculated by using the energy conservation equation and the empirical correlations of two-phase pressure drop and boiling heat transfer. As a result, the refrigerant state in the ultrafine cryoprobe depends on the external heat flux. Finally, the required geometry of the ultrafine cryoprobe to make high cooling performance is evaluated.


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