Investigation of critical heat flux enhancement on nanoengineered surfaces in pressurized subcooled flow boiling using infrared thermometry

Abstract

Enhancing the flow boiling critical heat flux (CHF) is beneficial to the economics and safety margins of many industrial applications cooled by boiling heat transfer. While many studies have shown that surfaces with hydrophilic nanoscale and micro-scale features can enhance CHF in pool boiling, it is still not clear how these engineered surfaces affect the CHF in subcooled flow boiling at ambient pressure, let alone high-pressure conditions. Here, two nano-engineered surfaces, i.e., a surface coated with a porous layer of hydrophilic silica nanoparticles and a surface coated with zinc oxide nanowires, were tested. Flow boiling tests with a 10 K subcooling and a mass flux of 1000 kg/(m2·s) were conducted at 1 bar and 4 bars using infrared thermometry diagnostics. At 1 bar, the CHF enhancement is around 15% for both coatings. At 4 bars, the CHF enhancement is around 17% for the nanowire surface, and around 25% for the nano-porous surface. Infrared thermometry measurements reveal that the CHF enhancement comes from an increase of both two-phase heat transfer and single-phase heat transfer mechanisms, which is due to a change of bubble dynamics on the nanoengineered surfaces. It is also shown that the boiling crisis can be predicted using a percolation model based on Monte Carlo (MC) simulations.