Dynamics of vapor bubble train in flow boiling heat transfer in microchannels

Abstract

Microchannel flow boiling is a promising technique for micro-device thermal management, and understanding the bubble dynamics in microchannel flow boiling is important for the applications. Previous studies only focused on single, isolated bubbles, but the bubbles in microchannel flow boiling applications often exist as bubble trains, in which the bubbles interact with each other. Here, we investigate numerically vapor bubble trains in microchannel flow boiling by adopting the flow-focusing technique to form monodispersed bubbles in the upstream of the microchannel. With increasing the initial vapor–liquid volume ratio, the bubble frequency increases while the growth rate of the bubbles decreases because of the reduced bubble size. With increasing the heat flux on the wall or reducing the latent heat of the working fluid, the bubble train growth rate increases because of the increased vaporization rate. The vaporization of the fluid in the upstream causes the bubble expansion and accelerates the bubble movement in the downstream. The wall temperature and the Nusselt number fluctuate because of the periodic pass-through of bubbles.