On the Heat Transfer Characteristics of a Single Bubble Growth and Departure During Pool Boiling

In the present study, bubble growth and departure characteristics during saturated pool boiling were investigated numerically, and a comprehensive model was proposed and developed to study the heat transfer during growth and departure of a bubble as well as bubble growth rate and departure time. Two-phase characteristics of the boiling phenomena can be captured by well-known Volume of Fluid (VOF) method. However, the VOF method is susceptible to parasitic currents because of approximate interface curvature estimations. Thus, sharp surface formula (SSF) method was employed to effectively eliminate the presence of the parasitic currents. VOF method is a volume capturing method and hence, may be subject to interface diffusion, due to the fact that interface is smeared through some number of computational cells. Interface compression scheme is applied to prevent the plausible interface diffusion of the VOF method. To avoid unrealistic temperature profiles at the solid-liquid surface, a conjugate heat transfer model was used to calculate the heat flux going into the liquid region from the heater through the solution of conduction equation in solids. Phase change at the interface was incorporated based on Hardt and Wondra’s model in which source terms are derived from a physical relationship for the evaporation mass flux. Furthermore, effects of micro region heat transfer on the departure time of the bubble was investigated. Micro region heat transfer was included in the model by solving a temporal evolution equation and incorporating the resulting heat flux in the tri-phase contact line. In this study, OpenFOAM package was used to investigate the characteristics of the bubble growth and departure as well as the wall heat flux. The model was benchmarked by comparing the simulation results to available experimental and numerical literatures, as well as analytical solutions.