Direct three-dimensional numerical simulation of nucleate boiling using the level contour reconstruction method

Abstract

The nucleate boiling process is known to be a very efficient mode of heat transfer. It is desirable to operate many engineering applications in this mode since high heat transfer rates and convection coefficients are associated with small values of the excess temperature. Despite its importance, nucleate boiling has not been fully numerically simulated until very recently because of the complexity of dealing with the phase change problem in addition to the interface method itself. Here we perform a full direct numerical simulation of nucleate boiling in a fully three-dimensional geometry using the Level Contour Reconstruction Method (Shin and Juric, 2002). Our work is aimed at predicting nucleate boiling heat flux values more accurately on a real surface by including the effect of nucleation site density in the numerical model. This has been achieved by changing the surface area for a single nucleate bubble corresponding to the wall temperature. A large body of research in nucleate boiling deals with developing experimental correlations for heat transfer during the nucleate boiling process. Here we briefly review some of the heat transfer correlations developed for wall heat transfer in nucleate boiling. Tien (1962) obtained a