Numerical and Experimental Investigation of Boiling Heat Transfer for Subcooled Water Flowing in a Small-Diameter Tube

Numerical simulation of boiling heat transfer for subcooled water flowing in a small-diameter tube was conducted using the commercial computational fluid dynamics (CFD) code, PHOENICS ver. 2013. A small-diameter tube (d = 1.0–2.0 mm) was modeled in the simulation. A uniform heat flux with an exponential function was given at the inner tube wall as the boundary conditions. The inner wall boundary condition was set to a non-slip. The inlet temperature ranged from 302 to 312 K. The flow velocities of d = 1.0 mm and d = 2.0 mm are 9.29 m/s and 2.34 m/s, respectively. The transient analysis was carried out from the non-boiling region since the heat flux increased with time in the author’s experiments. The governing equations including the energy equation were discretized using the finite volume method in the PHOENICS code. The SIMPLE method was applied for the numerical simulation. For modeling boiling phenomena in the tube, the Eulerian-Eulerian two-fluid model was adopted using the interphase slip algorithm of PHOENICS code. In the experiment, a platinum tube was used as the experimental tube (d = 1.0–2.0 mm) to conduct joule heating by direct current. The distilled and deionized water was pressured by the pressurizer. The heat generation rate of the tube was controlled with the exponential function to obtain the transient heat transfer characteristics from the non-boiling region. The surface superheat increased as the heat flux increased in the experiment. The numerical simulation predicted the experimental data well. When the heat flux of the experiment was reached to the CHF point, the predicted value of heat transfer coefficient was approximately 3.5 % lower than that of the experiment.