A General Correlation for Saturated Two-Phase Flow Boiling Heat Transfer Inside Horizontal and Vertical Tubes

A simple correlation was developed earlier by Kandlikar (1983) for predicting saturated flow boiling heat transfer coefficients inside horizontal and vertical tubes. It was based on a model utilizing the contributions due to nucleate boiling and convective mechanisms. It incorporated a fluid-dependent parameter F_fl in the nucleate boiling term. The predictive ability of the correlation for different refrigerants was confirmed by comparing it with the recent data on R-113 by Jensen and Bensler (1986) and Khanpara et al. (1986). In the present work, the earlier correlation is further refined by expanding the data base to 5246 data points from 24 experimental investigations with ten fluids. The proposed correlation, equations (4) and (5), along with the constants given in Tables 3 and 4, gives a mean deviation of 15.9 percent with water data, and 18.8 percent with all refrigerant data, and it also predicts the correct h_TP versus x trend as verified with water and R-113 data. Additional testing with recent R-22 and R-113 data yielded the lowest mean deviations among correlations tested. The proposed correlation can be extended to other fluids by evaluating the fluid-dependent parameter F_fl for that fluid from its flow boiling or pool boiling data.