Critical heat flux of subcooled flow boiling with water for high heat flux application

Subcooled flow boiling in water is thought to be advantageous in removing high heat load of more than 10 MW/m2. Characteristics of the critical heat flux (CHF), which determines the upper limit of heat removal, are very important for the design of cooling systems. In this paper, studies on subcooled flow boiling CHF, which have been conducted by the authors, are reported. Experiments were conducted using direct current heating of stainless steel tube. For uniform heating conditions, CHF increment in small diameter tubes (1 - 3 mm inside diameter) and the CHF characteristics in tubes with internal twisted tapes were investigated, and also the existing CHF correlations for ordinary tubes (more than 3 mm inside diameter) were evaluated. For peripherally non-uniform heating conditions using the tube, whose wall thickness was partly reduced, the CHF for swirl flow was higher than the CHF under uniform heating conditions with an increase of the non-uniformity factor.