The effect of reduced pressure on carbon dioxide flow boiling heat transfer in minichannels

In the paper presented are the results of the study on the effect of reduced pressure on flow boiling heat transfer data in minichannels as well as conventional ones. That effect renders that most of heat transfer correlations fail to return appropriate results of predictions. Mostly they have been developed for the reduced pressures from the range 0.1-0.3. The special correction has been postulated to the in-house model of flow boiling and condensation which modifies the two-phase flow multiplier as well as the temperature gradient in pool boiling. Four two-phase flow multiplier models were tested for this purpose, i.e. due to Friedel, Tran, Müller-Steinhagen and Heck and finally its in-house modification for applicability to minichannels. The model has been tested against a large selection of experimental data collected from various researchers to investigate the sensitivity of the in-house developed model. The collected experimental data came from various studies from literature and were conducted for the full range of quality variation and a wide range of mass velocity and saturation temperatures. In the work are presented the results of calculations obtained using the in-house developed semi empirical model on selected experimental flow boiling data related to carbon dioxide.