Investigation of saturated critical heat flux in a single, uniformly heated microchannel

A series of tests have been performed to determine the saturated critical heat flux (CHF) in 0.5 and 0.8 mm internal diameter microchannel tubes as a function of refrigerant mass velocity, heated length, saturation temperature and inlet liquid subcooling. The tested refrigerants were R-134a and R-245fa and the heated length of microchannel was varied between 20 and 70 mm. The results show a strong dependence of CHF on mass velocity, heated length and microchannel diameter but no influence of liquid subcooling (2–15 °C) was observed. The experimental results have been compared to the well-known CHF single-channel correlation of Y. Katto and H. Ohno An improved version of the generalized correlation of critical heat flux for the forced convective boiling in uniformly heated vertical tubes, Int. J. Heat and Mass Transfer 27 (9) (1984) 1641–1648] and the multichannel correlation of W. Qu and I. Mudawar Measurement and correlation of critical heat flux in two-phase microchannel heat sinks, Int. J. Heat and Mass Transfer 47 (2004) 2045–2059]. The comparison shows that the correlation of Katto–Ohno predicts microchannel data with a mean absolute error of 32.8% with only 41.2% of the data falling within a ±15% error band. The correlation of Qu and Mudawar shows the same trends as the CHF data but significantly overpredicts them. Based on the present experimental data, a new microscale version of the Katto–Ohno correlation for the prediction of CHF during saturated boiling in microchannels has been proposed.