Experimental investigation and modeling of falling film heat transfer on partial dry-out condition

Abstract

Falling film heat transfer has been applied for decay heat removal in more and more nuclear reactors, in which the coolant feed rate is set small to prolong the effective cooling time during accident conditions. Previous works have shown that the cooling surface is under partial dry-out condition for most of the time during the accident, while the existing falling film experiments are mainly focused on fully-wetted condition. In this paper, falling film experiments were conducted on a horizontal plain copper tube within 0.019–0.099 kg/m·s coolant flow rate, 0–164.1 kW/m2 heat flux, and dry-out condition is emphasized. In the experiments, it is found that the overall liquid coverage rate measured by infrared equipment was between 45.2 % and 100 %, and the dry-out process is recorded and analyzed as well. Moreover, HTC (Heat Transfer Coefficient) at wetting area is defined to characterize the heat transfer on the surface covered by liquid and is obtained based on a three-dimensional heat conduction model of test tube. Boiling HTCs on falling film are found 10 % approximately higher than that in pool boiling condition. The difference is attribute to the different mechanism of bubble departure and bubble growth environment, with which the falling film condition is found to result in a 1–3 times bubble departure diameter and a 0.85 times bubble growth rate compared with pool boiling condition. Finally, a general falling film heat transfer model is developed based on the conservation equations with consideration of liquid coverage, gas–liquid interface evaporation and liquid sub-cooling. The model shows effective for falling film heat transfer prediction on both fully-wetted and dry-out, convection and boiling conditions with different working fluids through the validation with a number of experimental data. The findings in this work could be helpful for the design and analysis of nuclear cooling system, as well as the falling film evaporation system.