Simultaneous laser- and infrared-based measurements of the life cycle of a vapour bubble during pool boiling

Abstract

Nucleate boiling is one of the most effective heat removal modes and has found use in a wide range of cooling applications, from the scale of state-of-the-art densely packed integrated circuits to the majority of current nuclear reactors. While a substantial amount of research has been performed over the years on both pool and flow boiling, this has predominantly focused on qualitative visualisation, often high-speed, aimed at observing the complex and multiphase transport phenomena involved in nucleate boiling, and the development of empirical methods to try to quantify global quantities of interest, such as heat transfer coefficients and pressure drops. In this work, simultaneous laser-based diagnostic and infrared techniques are developed to obtain detailed spatio-temporally-resolved measurements of temperature and velocity fields for single-bubble nucleate boiling. The results show the intrinsic coupled nature of the flow and thermal fields and provide insight into the interaction of these phenomena.