Flow Boiling Heat Transfer Coefficient and Frictional Pressure Drop Correlations for R32

The objective of this study is to establish generalized correlations for R32 flow boiling heat transfer and frictional pressure drop in channels with wide ranges of geometric and flow parameters. In this paper, two consolidated databases for heat transfer and frictional pressure drop were amassed from open literature, which involved R32 as working fluid. The heat transfer database consisted of 1 489 data points from 8 sources, with hydraulic diameters of 1—6.3 mm, while the pressure drop database included 496 data points from 8 sources, which covered hydraulic diameters of 0.643—6 mm. A new heat transfer coefficient correlation and a frictional pressure drop correlation were developed based on the prediction technique of dimensionless parameter analysis considering the governing force effect. Moreover, the existing correlations were also introduced to perform assessment. The validation results show that the existing correlations have poor results of mean absolute errors (MAE) and significantly high maximum absolute errors (MAX), but the new heat transfer coefficient correlation provides a superior prediction accuracy with a MAE of 14.59% and 90.85% of data within ±30% error bands. In addition, the new pressure drop correlation exhibits the best performance, which yields a MAE of 17.86%. The two new correlations have a broad application range and satisfactory prediction accuracy, which are applicable to analyze the heat transfer and pressure drop performance of heat exchangers with refrigerant R32.