Electrohydrodynamic effects on characteristic of isolated bubbles in the nucleate pool boiling regime

Abstract

Application of electric fields demonstrates great promise as an active heat transfer enhancement technique. Here, we study experimentally some characteristics of isolated bubbles such as bubble departure diameter, nucleation rate (frequency), and density of nucleation sites under the influence of an electric field In the nucleate pool boiling regime, isolated bubbles were recorded with a high-speed video camera at a rate of 1000 frames/s. The quantitative and qualitative analyses of bubble characteristics, and latent heat transfer concluded that at a constant heat flux condition in the isolated bubble regime, the density of nucleation sites was a very sensitive boiling parameter when electric field varied. The latent heat contribution varied proportional with the density of nucleation sites when heat flux and/or electrode voltage varied. This further simplifies the complex task of modeling of the electrohydrodynamic enhanced pool boiling heat transfer in the isolated bubble regime.