Review of Correlations of Flow Boiling Heat Transfer Coefficients for Nitrogen

Abstract

As an excellent cryogenic cooling medium, Nitrogen (N2) has been used in a variety of engineering fields, where the determination of N2 two-phase flow boiling heat transfer is required. There were some studies evaluating the correlations of flow boiling heat transfer coefficient for N2. However, either the number of correlations covered or the number of data used was limited. This work presents a comparative review of existing correlations of flow boiling heat transfer coefficients for N2 applications. A database of N2 flow boiling heat transfer containing 1043 experimental data points is compiled to evaluate 45 correlations of two-phase flow boiling heat transfer. The experimental parameters cover the ranges of mass flux from 28.0 to 1684.8 kg/m2s, heat flux from 0.2 to 135.6 kW/m2, vapor quality from 0.002 to 0.994, saturation pressure from 0.1 to 3.16 MPa, and channel inner diameter from 0.351 to 14 mm. The results show that the best correlation has a mean absolute deviation of 31.8% against the whole database, suggesting that more efforts should be made to study N2 flow boiling heat transfer to develop a more accurate correlation.