Boiling Heat Transfer Characteristics for Methane, Ethane and Their Binary Mixtures

Abstract

Methane (R50) and ethane (R170) are the dominated components of natural gas and the important components in mixture refrigerants for the mixture Joule–Thomson refrigeration cycle. In this article, experimental investigations on nucleate pool boiling and flow boiling heat transfer characteristics of R50, R170, and their binary mixtures are presented. The effects of saturation pressure, heat flux, mass flux, concentration, and vapor quality on heat transfer coefficients are analyzed and discussed. Firstly, the pool boiling heat transfer data were compared with six well-known correlations. Labuntsov correlation shows the best agreement with a mean absolute relative deviation (MARD) of 11.3%. Secondly, a new flow boiling heat transfer correlation for pure fluids was proposed based on the asymptotic addition of forced convection and pool boiling. The modified enhancement factor and suppression factor were developed to account for their relative contribution. In addition, in order to consider the mass transfer resistance of mixtures, a new mixture factor was deduced. The new flow boiling heat transfer correlations can well predict the experimental data with the MARD of 9.5% for pure fluids and 8.3% for mixtures.