CFD simulations of pool boiling with various heater wall conditions

Abstract

Boiling is the most efficient ways of heat transfer even for high power density conditions in many industrial applications. The performance of boiling heat transfer (BHT) is mainly dependent on the boiling heat transfer coefficient and wall superheat. Especially, interface temperature, i.e. heater surface temperature is determined by thermal effusivity, which is the parameter related to the speed of heat absorption by solid material defined by material properties. As a preliminary step of investigating the effect of the effusivity on the BHT, new solver for thermal phase change, twoInterPhaseChangeFoam is developed with a basis of open source CFD package, OpenFOAM. It solves two incompressible, immiscible fluids with thermal phase change such as boiling or condensation using a volume-of-fluid (VOF) interface capturing method based on the physical phenomena for phase change with minimized assumptions. Since this solver considers minimal assumptions for mass, momentum and energy transfer due to phase change, its application ranges are not limited to the conditions of empirical correlations. This paper covers the development of new solver and discussions about boiling simulation results under various conditions in preliminary stages.