Thermal management issues have become a major bottleneck for further miniaturization and increased power consumption of electronics. Power electronics require more increasing use of high heat flux cooling technologies. Spray cooling with phase change has the advantage of large amount of heat transfer from the hot surface of many power electronics. Spray cooling is a complex phenomenon due to the interaction of liquid, vapor, and phase change at small length scale. A good understanding of the underlying physics and the heat removal process in spray cooling through numerical modeling is needed to design efficient spray cooling system. A computational fluid dynamics based 3D multiphase model for spray cooling is developed here in parallel computing environment using multigrid conjugate gradient solver. This model considers the effect of surface tension, gravity, phase change, and viscosity. The level set method is used to capture the movement of the liquid-vapor interface. The governing equations are solved using finite difference method. Spray cooling is studied using this model, where a vapor bubble is growing in a thin liquid film on a hot surface and a droplet is impacting on the thin film. The symmetry boundary condition considered on four sides of the domain effectively represents a large spray made up of multiple equally sized droplets and bubbles and their interaction. Studies have also been performed for different wall superheats in the absence of vapor bubble to compare the effect of two-phase heat transfer compared to single-phase in spray cooling. The computed interface, temperature, and heat flux distributions at different times over the domain are visualized for better understanding of the heat removal mechanism.
Skip Nav Destination
e-mail: rps@uark.edu
Article navigation
December 2009
This article was originally published in
Journal of Heat Transfer
Research Papers
Direct Numerical Simulation of Heat Transfer in Spray Cooling Through 3D Multiphase Flow Modeling Using Parallel Computing
Suranjan Sarkar,
Suranjan Sarkar
Computational Mechanics Laboratory,
University of Arkansas
, Bell 4190, Fayetteville, AR 72701
Search for other works by this author on:
R. Panneer Selvam
R. Panneer Selvam
Computational Mechanics Laboratory,
e-mail: rps@uark.edu
University of Arkansas
, Bell 4190, Fayetteville, AR 72701
Search for other works by this author on:
Suranjan Sarkar
Computational Mechanics Laboratory,
University of Arkansas
, Bell 4190, Fayetteville, AR 72701
R. Panneer Selvam
Computational Mechanics Laboratory,
University of Arkansas
, Bell 4190, Fayetteville, AR 72701e-mail: rps@uark.edu
J. Heat Transfer. Dec 2009, 131(12): 121007 (8 pages)
Published Online: October 15, 2009
Article history
Received:
February 13, 2008
Revised:
December 13, 2008
Published:
October 15, 2009
Citation
Sarkar, S., and Selvam, R. P. (October 15, 2009). "Direct Numerical Simulation of Heat Transfer in Spray Cooling Through 3D Multiphase Flow Modeling Using Parallel Computing." ASME. J. Heat Transfer. December 2009; 131(12): 121007. https://doi.org/10.1115/1.3220142
Download citation file:
Get Email Alerts
Cited By
Related Articles
Bubble Behavior and Nucleate Boiling Heat Transfer in Saturated FC-72 Spray Cooling
J. Heat Transfer (February,2002)
The Effect of Dissolving Salts in Water Sprays Used for Quenching a Hot Surface: Part 1—Boiling of Single Droplets
J. Heat Transfer (April,2003)
Molecular-to-Large-Scale Heat Transfer With Multiphase Interfaces: Current Status and New Directions
J. Heat Transfer (December,2009)
Modeling Wall Film Formation and Breakup Using an Integrated Interface-Tracking/Discrete-Phase Approach
J. Eng. Gas Turbines Power (March,2011)
Related Proceedings Papers
Related Chapters
Numerical Simulation of Nucleate Spray Cooling: Effect of Droplet Impact on Bubble Growth and Heat Transfer in a Thin Liquid Film
Inaugural US-EU-China Thermophysics Conference-Renewable Energy 2009 (UECTC 2009 Proceedings)
Nucleation of Bubbles in Perfluoropentane Droplets Under Ultrasonic Excitation
Proceedings of the 10th International Symposium on Cavitation (CAV2018)
Numerical Simulation of Collapsing Vapor Bubble Clusters Close to a Rigid Wall
Proceedings of the 10th International Symposium on Cavitation (CAV2018)