An experimental study of critical heat flux in non-uniformly heated vertical annulus under low flow conditions

An experimental study on critical heat flux (CHF) has been performed in an internally heated vertical annulus with non-uniform heating. The CHF data for the chopped cosine heat flux have been compared with those for uniform heat flux obtained from the previous study of the authors, in order to investigate the effect of axial heat flux distribution on CHF. The local CHF with the parameters such as mass flux and critical quality shows an irregular behavior. However, the total critical power with mass flux and the average CHF with critical quality are represented by a unique curve without the irregularity. The effect of the heat flux distribution on CHF is large at low pressure conditions but becomes rapidly smaller as the pressure increases. The relationship between the critical quality and the boiling length is represented by a single curve, independent of the axial heat flux distribution. For non-uniform axial heat flux distribution, the prediction results from Doerffer et al.'s and Bowring's CHF correlations have considerably large errors, compared to the prediction for uniform heat flux distribution.