Numerical Simulation of Saturated Film Boiling on a Horizontal Surface

Abstract

The past efforts in applying linear Taylor instability theory to the prediction of heat transfer during film boiling on a horizontal surface have suffered from the fact that empirical correlations must be used to define the shape of vapor-liquid interfaces and to determine the transport of mass and heat across these interfaces. The objective of this study is to clarify the physics of film boiling and to predict heat transfer coefficients through complete numerical simulation of the evolving interface between superposed layers of immiscible fluids. A coordinate transformation technique supplemented by a numerical grid generation method and a second-order projection method are combined to solve for the flow and temperature fields associated with an evolving interface. From the numerical simulation, the film thickness and, in turn, the heat transfer coefficient are found to vary both spatially and temporally. Increased wall superheat not only thickens the vapor film in the valley but also enlarges the vapor bulge. The effect of increased system pressure is to slow down the growth of the interface.

High Resolution Sharp Computational Methods for Elliptic and Parabolic Problems in Complex Geometries

“…[33] and the references therein). It is also used as a component for the study of vaporization processes [156,35,44,145,153,146,131,132,133,134]. In addition, this model is applicable to a wide variety of other applications, including epitaxial growth [23,116].…”

A Variable-Density Projection Method for Interfacial Flows

“…The original second-order Dukowicz-Dvinsky method was designed for solving the Stokes flow, in which the Crank-Nicholson scheme was employed to update the diffusion term with good stability. The projection method (15)- (17) with a ¼ 1 was also employed to simulate the boiling heat transfer [19] incorporated with the level set approach, in which the first-order fully implicit scheme and the explicit scheme were employed to update the diffusion and convective terms respectively.…”

“…The first-order fully explicit and full implicit schemes are employed to update the convective and diffusion terms, respectively. The temporal accuracy of the schemes in [4] and [19] has only first order. Ni et al [14] developed a general four-step or three-step projection method for unsteady incompressible singlephase flows.…”

“…Chen et al [4] employed the SIMPLE method [25] for the numerical simulation of bubble rising flows. Son and Dhir [19] employed the projection method to do numerical simulation of boiling heat transfer, which incorporates the level set approach for capturing the interface. The first-order fully explicit and full implicit schemes are employed to update the convective and diffusion terms, respectively.…”

Vapor bubbles in confined geometries : a numerical study

“…The simulations were limited to relatively short times however, due to the distortion of the grid. Similar problems were encountered in [50]. This limitation was overcome in [51] where a two-dimensional front tracking method was developed to study film boiling.…”