Heat transfer correlation for saturated flow boiling of water

The saturated flow boiling heat transfer of water (H2O, R718) is encountered in many applications such as compact heat exchangers and electronic cooling, for which an accurate correlation of evaporative heat transfer coefficients is necessary. A number of correlations for two-phase flow boiling heat transfer coefficients were proposed. However, their prediction accuracies for H2O are not satisfactory. This work compiles an H2O database of 1055 experimental data points from micro/mini-channels from nine independent studies, evaluates 41 existing correlations to provide a clue for developing a better correlation of saturated flow boiling heat transfer coefficients for H2O, and then proposes a new one. The new correlation incorporates a newly proposed dimensionless number and makes great progress in prediction accuracy. It has a mean absolute deviation of 10.1%, predicting 81.9% of the entire database within +/- 15% and 91.2% within +/- 20%, far better than the best existing one. Besides, it also works well for several other working fluids, such as R22, R134a, R410A and NH3 (ammonia, R717), being the best for R22, R410A and NH3 so far. (C) 2014 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.