Tailian Chen

Effects of Dissolved Air on Subcooled Flow Boiling of a Dielectric Coolant in a Microchannel Heat Sink

The effects of dissolved air in the dielectric liquid FC-77 on flow boiling in a microchannel heat sink containing ten parallel channels, each 500 m wide and 2.5 mm deep, were experimentally investigated. Experiments were conducted before and after degassing, at three flow rates in the range of 30– 50 ml/ min. The dissolved air resulted in a significant reduction in wall temperature at which bubbles were first observed in the microchannels. Analysis of the results suggests that the bubbles observed initially in the undegassed liquid were most likely air bubbles. Once the boiling process is initiated, the wall temperature continues to increase for the undegassed liquid, whereas it remains relatively unchanged in the case of the degassed liquid. Prior to the inception of boiling in the degassed liquid, the heat transfer coefficients with the undegassed liquid were 300– 500 % higher than for degassed liquid, depending on the flow rate. The heat transfer coefficients for both cases reach similar values at high heat fluxes 120 kW/ m 2 once the boiling process with the degassed liquid was well established. The boiling process induced a significant increase in pressure drop relative to single-phase flow; the pressure drop for undegassed liquid was measured to be higher than for degassed liquid once the boiling process became well established in both cases. Flow instabilities were induced by the boiling process, and the magnitude of the instability was quantified using the standard deviation of the measured pressure drop at a given heat flux. It was found that the magnitude of flow instability increased with increasing heat flux in both the undegassed and degassed liquids, with greater flow instability noted in the undegassed liquid. DOI: 10.1115/1.2351905

Flow Boiling Heat Transfer to a Dielectric Coolant in a Microchannel Heat Sink

This paper presents an experimental study of flow boiling heat transfer in a microchannel heat sink. The dielectric fluid Fluorinert FC-77 is used as the boiling liquid after it is fully degassed. The experiments were performed at three flow rates ranging from 30-50ml/min. The heat transfer coefficients, as well as the critical heat flux (CHF), were found to increase with flow rate. Wall temperature measurements at three locations (near the inlet, near the exit, and in the middle of heat sink) reveal that wall dryout first occurs near the exit of the microchannels. The ratio of heat transfer rate under CHF conditions to the limiting evaporation rate was found to decrease with increasing flow rate, asymptotically approaching unity. Predictions from a number of correlations for nucleate boiling heat transfer in the literature are compared against the experimental results to identify those that provide a good match. The results of this work provide guidelines for the thermal design of microchannel heat sinks in two-phase flow

A Study of Critical Heat Flux During Flow Boiling in Microchannel Heat Sinks

The cooling capacity of two-phase transport in microchannels is limited by the occurrence of critical heat flux (CHF). Due to the nature of the phenomenon, it is challenging to obtain reliable CHF data without causing damage to the device under test. In this work, the critical heat fluxes for flow boiling of FC-77 in a silicon thermal test die containing 60 parallel microchannels were measured at five total flow rates through the microchannels in the range of 20–80 ml/min. CHF is caused by dryout at the wall near the exit of the microchannels, which in turn is attributed to the flow reversal upstream of the microchannels. The bubbles pushed back into the inlet plenum agglomerate; the resulting flow blockage is a likely cause for the occurrence of CHF which is marked by an abrupt increase in wall temperature near the exit and an abrupt decrease in pressure drop across the microchannels. A database of 49 data points obtained from five experiments in four independent studies with water, R-113, and FC-77 as coolants was compiled and analyzed. It is found that the CHF has a strong dependence on the coolant, the flow rate, and the area upon which the heat flux definition is based. However, at a given flow rate, the critical heat input (total heat transfer rate to the coolant when CHF occurs) depends only on the coolant and has minimal dependence on the details of the microchannel heat sink (channel size, number of channels, substrate material, and base area). The critical heat input for flow boiling in multiple parallel microchannels follows a well-defined trend with the product of mass flow rate and latent heat of vaporization. A power-law correlation is proposed which offers a simple, yet accurate method for predicting the CHF. The thermodynamic exit quality at CHF is also analyzed and discussed to provide insights into the CHF phenomenon in a heat sink containing multiple parallel microchannels.

An Experimental Study of Miniature-Scale Pool Boiling

By generating single bubbles on a micro-heater at different wall superheats, an experimental study of miniature-scale pool boiling heat transfer has been performed to provide a fundamental understanding of the heater size effect. In this study, the constant-temperature microheater is set at different temperatures by an electronic feedback control system. The heat transfer history during the lifetime of a single bubble which includes nucleation, growth, detachment and departure has been measured. The boiling curve obtained from the microheater is composed of two regimes which are separated by a peak heat flux. It is suggested that in the lower superheat regime, the boiling is dominated by liquid rewetting and micro-layer evaporation, while in the higher superheat regime, conduction through the vapor film and micro-convection plays the key heat transfer role as the heater is covered by vapor all the time. In general, boiling on microheaters is characterized by larger bubble departure sizes, smaller bubble growth rates due to the dryout of microlayer as the bubble grows, and higher bubble incipience superheat. As the heater size decreases, the boiling curve shifts towards higher heat fluxes with corresponding higher superheats.

Water-Heated Pool Boiling of Different Refrigerants on the Outside Surface of a Horizontal Smooth Tube

Pool boiling heat transfer has been extensively studied over decades, but the effect of boundary heating conditions on boiling received little attention. In this work, heat transfer coefficients during pool boiling of five different refrigerants (R123, R245fa, R236fa, R134a, and R22) on the outside surface of a smooth copper tube were measured at the saturation temperature of 6.7 C; water flows inside the tube and provides heat to the refrigerants to boil (thus, water-heated boiling). Measurements showed that the refrigerant of a higher vapor pressure has a higher heat transfer coefficient, with the exception that R22 performs nearly the same as R134a. A correlation previously developed for electrically-heated pool boiling on cylindrical tubes underpredicts by 30%–46% the heat transfer coefficients during water-heated boiling of the five refrigerants. Among the pool boiling correlations reviewed in this work, the Cooper correlation (for pool boiling on cylindrical tubes) predicts the boiling heat transfer coefficients of R22 and R245fa reasonably well (within 68.5%), but not as well those of the other three refrigerants (underpredicts by nearly 30% for R134a and R236fa and overpredicts by nearly 40% for R123). It is found that the predicted boiling heat transfer coefficients of the five refrigerants by the modified Gorenflo correlation (simply adding a constant multiplier of 1.47 to the Gorenflo correlation) are in excellent agreement with their respective measurements. [DOI: 10.1115/1.4004902]