Natural convection boiling of water and surfactant solutions at atmospheric pressure in narrow horizontal annular channels was studied experimentally. The Alkyl (8–16) Glucoside with molecular weight of 390 g/mol was used in the experiments. It is a nonionic surfactant with negligible environmental impact. The length of the horizontal channels was 24 mm and 36 mm, the gape size was in the range of 0.45–3.7 mm, the heat flux was in the range of 20–500 kW/m2, the concentration of surfactant solutions was varied from 10 to 600 ppm. The gap size of the vertical channels was changed in the range of 1–80 mm. The flow pattern was visualized by high-speed video recording to identify the different regimes of boiling of water and surfactant solutions with different concentrations. At heat flux q<100 kW/m2 the rapid growth of elongated bubble was observed in the water. The rapid bubble growth pushes the liquid-vapor interface on both open sides of the channel. When a bubble departs from a nucleus cavity, its cavity is then recovered by liquid, and next bubble will appear on the heated tube after a certain interval. The behavior of the long vapor bubbles occurring in small size annular channels is not similar to annular flow with intermitted slugs between two vapor trains. Surfactant solution promotes activation of nucleation sites in a clustered mode. The cluster contains a number of small bubbles, the location of nucleation sites and time behavior of each bubble cannot be traced exactly. At higher values of heat flux coalescence process was observed during boiling of water and surfactant solutions. For water boiling in horizontal channels at Bond numbers Bo<1 the CHF in restricted space is lower than that in unconfined apace. This effect increases with increasing the channel length. For water at Bond number Bo = 1.52, boiling can be considered as unconfined. Additive of surfactant led to enhancement of heat transfer compared to water boiling in the same gap size, however, this effect decreased with decreasing gap size. For the same gap size, CHF in surfactant solutions was significantly lower than that in water. Hysteresis was observed for boiling in degraded surfactant solutions.

This content is only available via PDF.
You do not currently have access to this content.