Robert Pastuszko

Pool boiling on surfaces with mini-fins and micro-cavities

The experimental studies presented here focused on pool boiling heat transfer on mini-fin arrays, mini-fins with perforated covering and surfaces with micro-cavities. The experiments were carried out for water and fluorinert FC-72 at atmospheric pressure. Mini-fins of 0.5 and 1 mm in height were uniformly spaced on the base surface. The copper foil with holes of 0.1 mm in diameter (pitch 0.2/0.4 mm), sintered with the fin tips, formed a system of connected perpendicular and horizontal tunnels. The micro-cavities were obtained through spark erosion. The maximal depth of the craters of these cavities was 15 – 30 μm and depended on the parameters of the branding-pen settings. At medium and small heat fluxes, structures with mini-fins showed the best boiling heat transfer performance both for water and FC-72. At medium and high heat fluxes (above 70 kW/m2 for water and 25 kW/m2 for FC-72), surfaces with mini-fins without porous covering and micro-cavities produced the highest heat transfer coefficients. The surfaces obtained with spark erosion require a proper selection of geometrical parameters for particular liquids – smaller diameters of cavities are suitable for liquids with lower surface tension (FC-72).