Heat transfer intensity at water boiling on the surface of a capillary structure under sub-atmospheric pressure

Abstract

This paper considers the effect of structural parameters and saturation pressure on the intensity of heat transfer from boiling on porous structures made of copper metal fibers. The study involved changing the structural and geometric characteristics of porous samples and saturation pressure. The study regime parameters were chosen based on the conditions of operation of steam chambers, namely the horizontal orientation of the work area, the capillary transport of the heat carrier to the work area. It was determined that reducing saturation pressure from 0.1 MPa to 0.012 MPa leads to a reduction in heat transfer by 15‒20 % depending on the parameters of porous structures. This pattern has been explained in this paper by the increased detachable diameters of steam bubbles that thus overlap part of the capillary structure's vaporization area, which leads to a decrease in the values of the discharged heat flux at the same temperature gradient values. The influence of values of the porosity and diameters of fibers, which the samples of a capillary structure were made from, was ambiguous. The parameter chosen for generalizing the data obtained was an effective diameter of the samples' pores, which is a more general characteristic. The generalization of the experimental data has demonstrated that the efficiency of heat transfer increases with an increase in the effective diameter of pores in the examined range from 20 to 90 µm. Estimation dependences have been built to determine the intensity of heat transfer under sub-atmospheric pressures for metal-fibrous porous structures at a deviation of up to ±30 %. It turned out that the resulting dependences could be used to determine the intensity of heat transfer by the examined powder structures under the sub-atmospheric pressure conditions. Applying these dependences would make it easier to design thermal stabilization systems based on steam chambers.