The effect of surfactant concentrations and surface material on heat transfer coefficient in nucleate boiling regime

Abstract

Abstract The nucleate boiling regime and two-phase flow are greater importance to the safety analysis of nuclear reactors. In this study, the boiling heat transfer in nuclear reactor is numerical investigated. The computational fluid dynamics (CFD) code, ANSYS Fluent 17.2 is used and the boiling model is employed. The numerical predictions obtained are compared with the experimental data reported by A. Hamza et al. [9]. An experimental test rig is designed and constructed to investigate the effect of cooling water chemistry control and the material of heater surface. CFD software, allows the detailed analysis of the two-phase flow and heat transfer. In this paper, we evaluate the accuracy of the boiling model implemented in the ANSYS Fluent code. This model is based on the heat flux partitioning approach and accommodates the heat flux due to single-phase convection, quenching and evaporation. The validation carried out of surfactant fluid/vapor two-phase flow inside the 2-D cylindrical boiling vessel. A heated horizontal pipe with stainless steel, Aluminum, and Zircalloy surface materials are used to numerically predict the field temperature and void fraction. Different surfactant concentrations ranging from 0, (pure water) to 1500 ppm, and heat fluxes ranging from 31 to 110 kW/m2 are used. The results of the predicted model depict that the addition of SDS Surfactant and increasing the heat flux improves the coefficient of boiling heat transfer for a given concentration. Also, it was found that the increasing of the concentration of aqueous surfactant solution increases the pool boiling heat transfer coefficient. The aqueous surfactant solution SDS improved the heat transfer coefficient of Aluminum, Zircalloy and stainless steel surface materials by 135%.138% and 120% respectively. The results of the numerical model are nearly in agreement with that measured in experimental.