Correlation of the Flow Pattern and Flow Boiling Heat Transfer in Microchannels

Flow boiling in microchannels is characterized by the considerable influence of capillary forces and constraint effects on the flow pattern and heat transfer. In this paper we used the flow patterns of gas-liquid flow in rectangular microchannel to explain the regularities of refrigerants flow boiling heat transfer. The characteristics of the flow such as frequency of elongated bubbles, their length, velocity of liquid and gas phases were determined by dual laser flow scanning for the upward and horizontal nitrogen-water flow in microchannels with the size of 1500×720 μm. The flow pattern boundaries were determined also and compared with extended Mishima and Ishii correlation. Flow boiling heat transfer data were obtained for vertical and horizontal microchannel heat sink with similar channels using refrigerants R21 and R134a. The data on local heat transfer coefficients were obtained in the range of mass flow rate from 33 to 190 kg/m2s, reduced pressure from 0.03 to 0.25 and heat flux from 10 to 160 kW/m². The flow boiling modes with nucleate and convective boiling were observed as far as heat transfer deterioration at high vapor quality and high heat flux. It was found that deterioration occurs for the annular flow when nucleate boiling was suppressed in a thin liquid film, and for elongated bubble flow pattern. The mechanism of heat transfer deterioration was discussed. The model of heat transfer deterioration was used to predict the experimental data.