FILM-30: A Heat Transfer Properties Code for Water Coolant

Abstract

A FORTRAN computer code has been written to calculate the heat transfer properties at the wetted perimeter of a coolant channel when provided the bulk water conditions. This computer code is titled FILM-30 and the code calculates its heat transfer properties by using the following correlations: (1) Sieder-Tate: forced convection, (2) Bergles-Rohsenow: onset to nucleate boiling, (3) Bergles-Rohsenow: partially developed nucleate boiling, (4) Araki: fully developed nucleate boiling, (5) Tong-75: critical heat flux (CHF), and (6) Marshall-98: transition boiling. FILM-30 produces output files that provide the heat flux and heat transfer coefficient at the wetted perimeter as a function of temperature. To validate FILM-30, the calculated heat transfer properties were used in finite element analyses to predict internal temperatures for a water-cooled copper mockup under one-sided heating from a rastered electron beam. These predicted temperatures were compared with the measured temperatures from the author's 1994 and 1998 heat transfer experiments. There was excellent agreement between the predicted and experimentally measured temperatures, which confirmed the accuracy of FILM-30 within the experimental range of the tests. FILM-30 can accurately predict the CHF and transition boiling regimes, which is an important advantage over current heat transfer codes. Consequently, FILM-30 is ideal for predicting heat transfer properties for applications that feature high heat fluxes produced by one-sided heating.