Boiling Heat Transfer in a Horizontal Small-Diameter Tube

Results of a study on boiling heat transfer of refrigerant R-113 in a small-diameter (2.92 mm) tube are reported. Local heat transfer coefficients are measured for a range of heat flux (8.8–90.75 kW/m²), mass flux (50–300 kg/m²s), and equilibrium mass quality (0–0.9). The measured coefficients are used to evaluate 10 different heat transfer correlations, some of which have been developed specifically for refrigerants. High heat fluxes and low mass fluxes are inherent in small channels, and this combination results in high boiling numbers. In addition, based on a flow pattern map developed from adiabatic experiments with air-water mixtures, it has been shown that small-diameter channels produce a slug flow pattern over a large range of parameters when compared with larger-diameter channels. The effects of high boiling number and slug flow pattern lead to domination by a nucleation mechanism. As a result, the two-phase correlations that predicted this dominance also predicted the data the best when they properly modeled the physical parameters. The correlation of Lazarek and Black (1982) predicted the data very well. It is also shown that a simple form, suggested by Stephan and Abdelsalam (1980) for nucleate pool boiling, correlates the data equally well; both correlations are within a mean deviation of less than 13 percent. Results are applicable to boiling in compact heat exchangers.