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• Distinct bubbly flow regimes of refrigerant R452B in vertical microchannel are visualized. • Flow boiling sequence is simulated to estimate heat transfer coefficients and pressure drops. • Effects of mass flux, heat flux and vapor quality on thermal and frictional outcomes are analyzed. • Fluid properties and two-phase flow patterns can notably affect heat transfer performance. • Bertsch/Sun and Mishima correlations can suitably calculate thermo/friction characteristics. Energy management efficiency is crucial for the increasingly severe global energy challenges. Low global warming potential (GWP) refrigerant R452B used in air conditioning and refrigeration systems could reduce the global warming effect for applications. The objective of this paper is to conduct the numerical and experimental studies for examining the thermal fluid behaviors of flow boiling evolution of refrigerant R452B in the vertical microchannels. In the experimental approach, a gear pump and a programmable DC power supply are employed to regulate the mass flux and heat flux for determining the heat transfer and pressure drop outcomes across the microchannel at varied vapor qualities. A high-speed camera with a LED fiber optical light source is used to observe the close-up optical images over the complex flow boiling process. Theoretically, the volume-of- fluid (VOF) method built in the computational fluid dynamics (CFD) software ANSYS/Fluent® is employed to simulate the progression of bubble nucleation processes for resolving the distributions of velocity, pressure, temperature and liquid volume fraction in the microchannel. The predictions are compared against the measured heat transfer coefficients and pressure drops for the CFD model validation. The time sequences of vapor volume fraction contours are also simulated to characterize the evolving vapor-liquid interfaces for better grasping the detailed behaviors of nucleation, growth, departure, coalescence of bubbles and the transformations of dominant flow patterns. The measured results estimate the average heat transfer coefficients and pressure drops up to 14.1 kW/m2K and 76.5 kPa at a mass flux of 600 kg/m2s in the microchannel. This research further conducts the performance assessments by testing the popular correlations, and thereby reveals the effectiveness of Bertsch as well as Sun and Mishima correlations to reasonably calculate the heat transfer coefficients and pressure drops of R452B refrigerant, involving the mean absolute errors of 12.5 % and 22.6 %, respectively. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

• 1 Flow and boiling heat transfer in a 5 mm tube were studied experimentally. • 2 Heat transfer enhancement is obviously founded in the region where x e < 0.05. • 3 New empirical correlations are developed based on the experimental data. • 4 New correlations have higher prediction accuracy than the existing correlations. Experimental investigation on flow boiling heat transfer in a small tube under high system pressure has been conducted in this study. The test-section is constructed with a 316L stainless steel tube. The inner diameter and heated length of the test-section are 5 mm and 930 mm, respectively. The working fluid is deionized water. The operating conditions of the experiments are as follows, the mass flux from 548 to 978 kg/(m2·s), the wall heat flux from 136 to 238 kW/m2, and the system pressure from 1.0 to 2.9 MPa. The experimental results showed that the inlet subcooling mainly affects the onset of nucleate boiling, but its impact on the heat transfer coefficient at the same vapor quality is almost negligible. The heat transfer coefficient increases with the increase of mass flux and wall heat flux, especially in the region where x e < 0.02. The average heat transfer coefficient is higher under high system pressure owing to the variation of the thermophysical properties. Additionally, the existing flow and heat transfer correlations cannot predict the flow boiling heat transfer coefficient and frictional pressure drop in the experiments accurately enough. Therefore, the new flow and heat transfer correlations are developed based on the experimental data in this paper, and the mean absolute deviation of the flow boiling heat transfer correlation and frictional pressure drop correlation are 13.3% and 12.1%, respectively. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

• A revised self-induced jet impingement device is introduced in pool boiling using R1336mzz(Z). • Liquid-vapor separation promoted by the revised device is confirmed from the visualization results. • The revised device does nearly no effort on the nucleate boiling heat transfer coefficient until a relatively high heat flux. • Parametric investigations on the characteristics of the revised device are conducted. • The revised device gains up to 69.5 % and 36.7 % in the critical heat flux and the maximum nucleate boiling heat transfer coefficient, respectively. Pool boiling performance enhancement has attracted considerable interest on high power electronic cooling. In this paper, we introduce a self-induced jet impingement device for practical boiling enhancement, achieved by integrating the guidance tube with an orifice plate. With R1336mzz(Z) as the working fluid, we conduct visualization and parametric investigations on the pool boiling performance, considering the varying characteristics of this device. Visualization snapshots confirm the liquid-vapor separation and indicate that the two-phase flow pattern in the guidance tube eventually stabilizes as a churn-annular flow. Our findings suggest that self-induced liquid jet impingement has a minimal effect on the nucleate boiling heat transfer coefficient (h NB) under a certain heat flux, around 75 % CHF of the standard pool boiling, as the single-phase heat transfer is weakened due to the low thermal conductivity of R1336mzz(Z). As the heat flux intensifies, we observe substantial enhancements in both the Critical Heat Flux (CHF) and the Maximum Nucleate Boiling Heat transfer coefficient (h MNB) resulted from the delayed onset of boiling crisis, owing to the additional liquid supply and the promotion on vapor exhausting. The parametric studies reveal that the flow rate of the liquid jet, amplified by either extending the length or the inner diameter of the guidance tube, or by increasing the number of jet holes, positively impacts the boiling performance. However, these improvements show diminishing returns. Our study shows enhancements in CHF and h MNB of up to 69.5 % and 36.7 %, respectively, compared to the standard pool boiling. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]