A Novel Semi-Empirical Correlation for Wall Heat Transfer During Saturated Nucleate Flow Boiling

Most of the existing empirical correlations for wall heat transfer during flow boiling show a limited predictability stemming mainly from so-called the suppression and enhancement factors, which are introduced to describe the boiling heat transfer hypothetically by a combination of nucleate pool boiling and single-phase forced convection. There is no physical basis strongly supporting the determination of these factors. This study, to avoid such limitations, presents a distinctive approach to the modeling of wall boiling heat transfer utilizing the physical concept of wall heat flux partitioning. A new correlation of local boiling heat transfer coefficient is composed of primary heat transfer mechanisms of transient conduction and forced convection. Heat transfer areas of these mechanisms replace the suppression and enhancement factors in the new correlation and are determined empirically by dimensionless analysis. Based on an experimental database of 3187 points collected for saturated boiling of various working fluids flowing inside channels of different configurations, the new correlation is obtained and compared with existing correlations widely used. The evaluation highlights much better predictability of the present correlation. While the other correlations show relatively large scattering with over 30% deviation from the experimental data, the newly proposed correlation shows an excellent agreement with a deviation of less than 10%. The good predictability would be from the well-structured physical basis and make the new correlation promising in practical boiling heat transfer analysis.