Thermodynamics of flow boiling heat transfer

Convective boiling in sub-cooled water flowing through a heated channel is essential in many engineering applications where high heat flux needs to be accommodated. It has been customary to represent the heat transfer by the boiling curve, which shows the heat flux versus the wall-minus-saturation temperature difference. However it is a rather complicated problem, and recent revisions of two-phase flow and heat transfer note that calculated values of boiling heat transfer coefficients present many uncertainties. Quite recently, the author has shown that the average thermal gap in the heated channel (the wall temperature minus the average temperature of the coolant) was tightly connected with the thermodynamic efficiency of a theoretical reversible engine placed in this thermal gap. In this work, whereas this correlation is checked again with data taken by General Electric (task III) for water at high pressure, a possible connection between this wall efficiency and the reversible-work theorem is explored.