Heat Transfer Correlations for Elongated Bubbly Flow in Flow Boiling Micro/Minichannels

An improved conventional-to-micro/minichannel criterion was proposed by using the Bond number and the liquid Reynolds number. In micro/minichannels, bubbles tend to be confined and elongated in the channel and the conventional two-phase flow theory loses its applicability. As significant disagreement in experimental trends and heat transfer mechanisms was reported for flow boiling in micro/minichannels in the literature, it is not possible to explain the discrepancy and predict all data points by a single correlation without considering the different flow patterns. In this study, heat transfer correlations for elongated bubbly flow in flow boiling micro/minichannels were developed based on a collected micro/minichannel heat transfer database. The newly developed correlations not only can present a decent overall accuracy, but also estimate the parametric trends correctly. More than 97% of the data points can be predicted by the proposed correlations within a +/- 50% error band for elongated bubbly flow. Also, a flow-pattern-based model can be developed by combining the developed elongated bubbly flow correlations with previous annular flow correlations for predicting flow boiling heat transfer in micro/minichannels.