Mirco Magnini

Computational Study of Saturated Flow Boiling Within a Microchannel in the Slug Flow Regime

This paper presents a fundamental study of the flow dynamics and heat transfer induced by a slug flow under saturated flow boiling in a circular microchannel. Numerical simulations are carried out by utilizing the commercial CFD solver ANSYS FLUENT v. 14.5, with its built-in volume of fluid (VOF) method to advect the interface, which was improved here by implementing self-developed functions to model the phase change and the surface tension force. A continuous stream of bubbles is generated (by additional user-defined functions) by patching vapor bubbles at the channel upstream with a constant generation frequency. This modeling framework can capture the essential features of heat transfer in slug flows for a continuous stream of bubbles which are here investigated in detail, e.g., the mutual influence among the growing bubbles, the fluid mechanics in the liquid slug trapped between two consecutive bubbles, the effect of bubble acceleration on the thickness of the thin liquid film trapped against the channel wall and on other bubbles, and the transient growth of the heat transfer coefficient and then its periodic variation at the terminal steady-periodic regime, which is reached after the transit of a few bubble-liquid slug pairs. Furthermore, the results for a continuous stream of bubbles are found to be quite different than that of a single bubble, emphasizing the importance of modeling multiple bubbles to study this process. Finally, the outcomes of this analysis are utilized to advance a theoretical model for heat transfer in microchannel slug flow that best reproduces the present simulation data.

Flow boiling heat transfer and pressure drops of R1234ze(E) in a silicon micro-pin fin evaporator

The development of newer and more efficient cooling techniques to sustain the increasing power density of high-performance computing systems is becoming one of the major challenges in the development of microelectronics. In this framework, two-phase cooling is a promising solution for dissipating the greater amount of generated heat. In the present study, an experimental investigation of two-phase flow boiling in a micro-pin fin evaporator is performed. The micro-evaporator has a heated area of 1 cm(2) containing 66 rows of cylindrical in-line micro-pin fins with diameter, height, and pitch of, respectively, 50 mu m, 100 mu m, and 91.7 mu m. The working fluid is R1234ze(E) tested over a wide range of conditions: mass fluxes varying from 750 kg/m(2) s to 1750 kg/m(2) s and heat fluxes ranging from 20 W/cm(2) to 44 W/cm(2). The effects of saturation temperature on the heat transfer are investigated by testing three different outlet saturation temperatures: 25 degrees C, 30 degrees C, and 35 degrees C. In order to assess the thermal-hydraulic performance of the current heat sink, the total pressure drops are directly measured, while local values of heat transfer coefficient are evaluated by coupling high-speed flow visualization with infrared temperature measurements. According to the experimental results, the mass flux has the most significant impact on the heat transfer coefficient while heat flux is a less influential parameter. The vapor quality varies in a range between 0 and 0.45. The heat transfer coefficient in the subcooled region reaches a maximum value of about 12 kW/m(2) K, whilst in two-phase flow it goes up to 30 kW/m(2) K.

Use of Two-Phase CFD Simulations to Develop a Boiling Heat Transfer Prediction Method for Slug Flow Within Microchannels

This work presents a new boiling heat transfer prediction method for slug flow within microchannels, which is developed and benchmarked against the results of two-phase CFD simulations. The proposed method adopts a two-zone decomposition of the flow for the sequential passage of a liquid slug and an evaporating elongated bubble. The heat transfer is modeled by assuming transient heat conduction across the liquid film surrounding an elongated bubble and sequential conduction/convection within the liquid slug. Embedded submodels for estimating important flow parameters, e.g. bubble velocity and liquid film thickness, are implemented as “building blocks”, thus making the entire modeling framework totally stand-alone. The CFD simulations are performed by utilizing ANSYS Fluent v. 14.5 and the interface between the vapor and liquid phases is captured by the built-in Volume Of Fluid algorithm. Improved schemes to compute the surface tension force and the phase change due to evaporation are implemented by means of self-developed functions. The comparison with the CFD results shows that the proposed method emulates well the bubble dynamics during evaporation, and predicts accurately the time-averaged heat transfer coefficients during the initial transient regime and the terminal steady-periodic stages of the flow.Copyright