Archive | 2021
Laser Surface Engineering for Boiling Heat Transfer Applications
Abstract
Global primary energy consumption grew at an average rate of 1.5% per year in the last decade, and the world’s total power demand is estimated to increase from 18 TW (in 2018) to over 23 TW by 2040 [1, 2]. Since thermal energy plays a primary role in the world’s total energy, the efficiency of thermal energy conversion is expected to be a very important factor in the technological progress of modern society. Phase change is considered to be the most effective end technically controllable mechanism of heat transfer due to the large change in enthalpy within a small temperature difference, allowing high energy transfer rates in high heat flux applications. Liquid vapor phase change in particular is a part of our everyday life and is utilized for cooling and general heat transfer in many applications on various scales – from boiling water reactors in large nuclear power plants [3] to small heat pipes, which are massively produced and are employed in computers, mobile phones, solar collectors, space applications and other fields [4, 5]. In addition to that, emerging technologies including electric vehicles, energy storage and renewable energy-based power generation systems will also need to consider phasechange heat transfer for cooling purposes [6]. Miniaturization and future development of high heat flux devices in terms of performance and safety concerns, therefore, depend on the enhancements in phase-change heat transfer. Over the last century, nucleate boiling became one of the primary topics in liquid vapor heat transfer research [7, 8] with a constant goal of enhancing the boiling process in terms of minimizing the surface temperature and increasing the critical heat flux (CHF), which defines the maximum attainable heat flux in the nucleate boiling regime [9–14]. Finding the ultimate enhancement approach is a challenging task, since the boiling process is a complex phenomenon and its definite physical