A Unified Three Dimensional Numerical Simulation of the Pool Boiling Curve

Abstract

Three dimensional numerical simulations for pool boiling of saturated water at atmospheric pressure conditions are performed on a horizontal surface using finite difference method under the framework of parallel computing. Since heat conduction in the solid phase is not considered, in order to simulate realistic heating surface, dependence of bubble nucleation frequency and nucleation site density on wall superheat and contact angle are obtained from the correlations reported in the literature. Steady state boiling curve for all the three regimes viz. nucleate, transition and film boiling has been obtained with a unified numerical model by incrementing the wall superheat for a static contact angle of 38°. Evaporative heat flux from the microlayer is separately accounted for in the present study by sub grid modeling. Both the phases are considered as incompressible while the interface separating the phases is solved using level set method. The governing equations of mass, momentum and energy for both the liquid and the vapor phase are solved coupled with the jump conditions at the interface employing ghost fluid and cut cell method. Diffusion terms are treated implicitly while convection terms are treated using second order ENO scheme. Spatial and temporal averaged wall heat flux and wall void fraction are plotted and compared against correlations and experimental values previously reported. The nucleate boiling heat flux obtained from the present numerical model is under predicted in comparison to the Stephan and Abdelsalam correlation. Comparison of the computed wall void fraction against experimental values is done for the transition boiling region. At critical heat flux formation of long vapor column was seen while intermittent liquid surface contacts were seen in the transition boiling regime. The computed critical heat flux value is lower than that obtained from the correlation of Maracy and Winterton.