Use of Two-Phase CFD Simulations to Develop a Boiling Heat Transfer Prediction Method for Slug Flow Within Microchannels

This work presents a new boiling heat transfer prediction method for slug flow within microchannels, which is developed and benchmarked against the results of two-phase CFD simulations. The proposed method adopts a two-zone decomposition of the flow for the sequential passage of a liquid slug and an evaporating elongated bubble. The heat transfer is modeled by assuming transient heat conduction across the liquid film surrounding an elongated bubble and sequential conduction/convection within the liquid slug. Embedded submodels for estimating important flow parameters, e.g. bubble velocity and liquid film thickness, are implemented as “building blocks”, thus making the entire modeling framework totally stand-alone. The CFD simulations are performed by utilizing ANSYS Fluent v. 14.5 and the interface between the vapor and liquid phases is captured by the built-in Volume Of Fluid algorithm. Improved schemes to compute the surface tension force and the phase change due to evaporation are implemented by means of self-developed functions. The comparison with the CFD results shows that the proposed method emulates well the bubble dynamics during evaporation, and predicts accurately the time-averaged heat transfer coefficients during the initial transient regime and the terminal steady-periodic stages of the flow.