EVALUATION OF FRICTIONAL PRESSURE DROP CORRELATIONS DURING FLOW BOILING OF REFRIGERANTS IN MICRO-FIN TUBES

Due to the widely commercial application of micro fin tube and eco-friendly refrigerants, more general frictional pressure drop correlations is demanded for better prediction, and this study is aimed at compared existing correlations and provide guides for the furthermore improvement. Experimental data points for frictional pressure drop during flow boiling of refrigerants in horizontal micro fin tubes were extracted from literature and our previous experimental work to evaluate numerous existing frictional pressure drop correlations and specify their applicability to meet the urgent demand of extensive application of eco-friendly refrigerants. The database consists of 949 data points covering eleven refrigerants (R1233zd(Z), R410A, R1234ze(E), R410A, R22, R32, R1234ze(Z), R22, R134a, R245fa and R1234yf included), and the involved operation conditions are as follows: mass velocity 94-888 kg m(-2) s(-1), vapor quality 0.04-0.99, heat flux 3.9-85.2 kW m(-2) , and equivalent diameter 2.12-11.84mm. Eight existing general frictional pressure drop correlation including Cavallini et al., Kuo and Wang, Wongsangam et al. and Rollman and Spindler correlation were evaluated against the present database. In addition, the Churchill et al. model was employed in several correlation to improve their performance. It was found that none of these correlations was capable of providing a satisfactory prediction for a general operation condition. A detailed predictive ability of these correlation against specific work fluids were given for reference, and their individual parametric-trend predictive ability were also compared under varied operating conditions using several datasets.