Visualization study of nucleate pool boiling of liquid nitrogen with quasi-steady heat input

Abstract

A visualization experimental device has been built to investigate the bubble behaviors in the nucleate pool boiling of cryogenic fluids at atmospheric pressure. The general morphologies of the bubbles are analyzed based on the captured films using a high-speed camera. The bubble behaviors leaving the wall at different heat flux can be divided into three regimes (low heat flux regime, fully developed nucleate boiling regime and intermediate regime) according to the availability of bubble parameters. In the low heat flux regime, the bubble is discrete and the interactive effects are ignorable. In the fully developed nucleate boiling regime close to CHF, the bubbles depart in the form of bubble cluster with a neck. In the intermediate regime, the interactive effect between the bubbles is significant and the bubbles follow a random pattern neither discretely nor as cluster neck. The information about the bubble departure diameter, the detachment frequency and the number density of activated sites are specially investigated. These data are used to evaluate the existing semi-empirical correlations widely applied to either the room-temperature or cryogenic fluids. It is found that the Kim’s correlation for the departure diameter predicts a satisfactory agreement with the experimental results in the isolated bubble regime. For the predictions of the detachment frequency, the correlation by Katto and Yokoya is recommended after comparison. The relation between the diameter and frequency can also be well determined by the correlation proposed by Mcfadden et al. The number density of active sites for liquid nitrogen still can be considered to be linearly proportional to ΔTm as it is for water, except that the exponent absolute m is much smaller.