A numerical study of heat transfer in saturated nucleate pool boiling process: a new analysis based on the inherent physics

In this paper, a direct numerical simulation of saturated nucleate pool boiling is performed using a hybrid front tracking method. A one-field formulation is applied to resolve the mass, momentum and energy equations including phase change. The well-known 1D Estefan problem and 2D film boiling process are studied to validate the implementation of the code. The obtained results are found to be in excellent agreement with the available analytical, numerical and experimental solutions in the literature. Afterward, the developed solver is employed to analyze the nucleate pool boiling problem. The continuous and complete cycles of the nucleate boiling phenomenon involving the corresponding sub-processes are well captured. Unlike the available results in the literature being mostly limited to some common fluids, here the respective non-dimensional parameters are employed to generalize the numerical study findings regardless of the fluid material. The time- and space-averaged Nusselt numbers are considered as a proper criterion to evaluate the heat transfer performance of boiling surface. The main non-dimensional parameters including Grashof, Prandtl and Jacob numbers are varied in the range of 17-300 and 2.8-8.6 as well as 0.017-0.5, respectively. It is observed that any change can cause a frequency variation of bubble departures and the temporal peaks of the space-averaged Nusselt number. Depending on the flow parameters, it is found that the time-averaged Nusselt number experiences an increase or decrease with respect to other cases. Also, the results obtained for nucleate pool boiling simulations show acceptable agreement with the ones predicted by empirical correlations.

Automated summary

In this paper, a direct numerical simulation of saturated nucleate pool boiling is performed using a hybrid front tracking method. The obtained results are in excellent agreement with previous analytical, numerical, and experimental studies. The effects of different fluids and dimensionless parameters on the heat transfer performance of the boiling surface are investigated, and the mechanisms and patterns of nucleate pool boiling are revealed.