BUBBLE BEHAVIOR AND HEAT TRANSFER MECHANISM IN FC-72 POOL BOILING

A transparent heater made of a thin synthetic diamond substrate along with a high-speed camera was used to investigate bubble behavior during pool boiling. The heater design, combined with the selected FC-72 liquid, overcame the difficulty of previous thin-film heater experiments where transparency and adequate heat flux could not be simultaneously achieved. It also resulted in an essentially uniform temperature field over the heater surface. The growth and merging of bubbles were visualized and quantitatively documented. The relative contribution from phase change to the overall heat flux was determined at several heat flux levels. At a heat flux level half of the critical heat flux (CHF), surface bubble nucleation was found to contribute to more than 70% of the heat transfer from the heater surface. At a similar heat flux level, the ratio of dry to wetted area was determined to exceed 1/3, significantly higher than that predicted by a recent hydrodynamic model for CHF (approximately 1/16). This result suggests that modifications are needed for the hydrodynamic model when applied to highly wetting fluid on nearly isothermal surfaces. The merging of bubbles to form vapor blankets over the heater surface was observed, as has been assumed in recent hydrodynamic models.