Review on pool boiling heat transfer of carbon dioxide

Abstract

Although application of carbon dioxide as working fluid in many fields of refrigeration technology has been recommended very often in the recent past, the data on nucleate boiling heat transfer of carbon dioxide in free convection are very scarce in the open literature and new investigations are almost entirely focussed on forced convective flow boiling. In the interpretation of the respective results, heat transfer to carbon dioxide is often characterized as being superior to other refrigerants due to the outstandingly favourable thermophysical properties of carbon dioxide for boiling heat transfer. Different from this view, the discussion of recent results on pool boiling heat transfer of carbon dioxide in this review demonstrates that the high heat transfer coefficients measured for carbon dioxide in comparison to hydrocarbon or halocarbon refrigerants are mainly due to the fact that application of carbon dioxide is mostly envisaged for conditions where reduced saturation pressure p*= p s/ p c ( p c, critical pressure) is higher than for common refrigerants. In the first part of the review, the three main influences—by heat flux, saturation pressure and fluid properties—on pool boiling of carbon dioxide are discussed using recent measurements for CO 2 by Kotthoff et al. [S. Kotthoff, U. Chandra, D. Gorenflo, A. Luke, New measurements of pool boiling heat transfer for carbon dioxide in a wide temperature range, Proceedings of the Sixth IIR-Gustav Lorentzen Conference, Glasgow, 2004 [paper 2/A/3.30]; see also S. Kotthoff, U. Chandra, D. Gorenflo, Neue Messungen zum Behältersieden von Kohlendioxid in einem grösseren Temperaturbereich, DKV-Tagungsbericht 22 (2004) [Bd.II. 1] 233–256 and other organic substances (Gorenflo et al.) [D. Gorenflo, S. Kotthoff, U. Chandra, New measurements of pool boiling heat transfer with hydrocarbons and other organics for update of VDI—Heat Atlas calculation method, Proceedings of the Sixth IIR-Gustav Lorentzen Conference, Glasgow, 2004 [paper 1/C/1.00]; Kotthoff and Gorenflo, [S. Kotthoff, D. Gorenflo, Influence of the fluid on pool boiling heat transfer of refrigerants and other organic substances, Proceedings of the IIR-Commission B1 Conference, Vicenza, 2005 [paper #TP-98]. In the second part, a comparison is given with the few former data available and with new results of Loebl and Kraus [S. Loebl, W.E. Kraus, Pool boiling heat transfer of carbon dioxide on a horizontal tube, Proceedings of the Sixth IIR-Gustav Lorentzen Conference, Glasgow, 2004 [paper 1/A/1.20]; S. Loebl, W.E. Kraus, Zum Wärmeübergang bei der Verdampfung von Kohlendioxid am horizontalen Rohr, DKV-Tagungsbericht 22 (2004) [Bd.II.1] 219–232 on the influence of the heating wall (material and surface roughness). Finally, analogies between nucleate pool boiling and new flow boiling data are shown for those domains of flow boiling in which nucleation provides the dominant contribution to heat transfer and convective effects are of secondary importance.