Pre-CHF boiling heat transfer performance on tube bundles with or without enhanced surfaces - a review

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.anucene.2019.107278Get rights and content

Highlights

  • Comprehensive review on pre-CHF boiling heat transfer enhancement over tube bundles.

  • Flow regime maps for boiling two-phase flow critically described.

  • Heat transfer coefficient correlations for tube bundle boiling summarized and analysed.

  • More types of bundle geometries and more extensive range of operating conditions examined.

  • The bundle effect in boiling over tube bundles with/without enhanced surfaces investigated.

Abstract

Boiling heat transfer over tube bundles has been extensively applied to various industries with a high demand for efficient heat transfer. This work presents a review of recently published studies on pre-CHF boiling heat transfer across plain and enhanced tube bundles. Bundle effect and heat transfer enhancement by modified heating surfaces under various operating and geometric parameters are analyzed. Flow regime maps for boiling two-phase flow in horizontal and vertical bundles are critically described separately. The local boiling heat transfer performance is affected by the non-uniform heat flux distribution in a bundle. A decreasing heat flux distribution along the bundle height can enhance the bundle effect. The effect of the pitch to diameter ratio on bundle effect also depends on the heat flux distribution. Significant influences of the bundle inclination angle and elevation angle on the boiling heat transfer were observed by researchers. Complex bundle effect was found in special shape bundles, such as V-shape, C-shape, and U-shape bundles, which suggests applying different HTC correlations to different regions in a bundle. Moreover, the bundle boiling behaviors under sub-atmospheric and sub-critical pressures have been examined. The heat transfer performance in tube bundles with enhanced surfaces is significantly impacted by the surface characteristics and the imposed heat flux. Bundle effect is still prominent, and the surface enhancement reduces along the bundle height. A mixed bundle with enhanced tubes only in the lower part can achieve the same heat transfer performance as a fully enhanced bundle.

Introduction

As an efficient heat transfer mode, boiling has been extensively applied to various industries, such as petrochemical, nuclear power generation, refrigeration and air conditioning, seawater desalination, and food processing. A single tube is seldom used in boiling applications, and instead in-line or staggered tubes are arranged in a bundle and submerged in the boiling liquid. It has been widely established that heat transfer can be enhanced when occurring over a tube bundle compared to over one single tube under the equivalent conditions. Two-phase shell and tube exchanger is one of the most common heat transfer devices which employs tube bundles as the heat transfer structure that allows fluids with different temperature exchanging heat through the tube surfaces. To effectively remove the generated vapor and maintain stable operation, shell side boiling is usually adopted.

The vapor bubbles generated on the lower tubes (horizontal tube bundle) or the bottom part of the tubes (vertical tube bundle) flow upwards through the entire tube bundle, thereby establishing a vapor–liquid two-phase flow which influences the heat transfer on individual tubes. The two-phase heat transfer in a bundle consists of contributions from single-phase convective heat transfer, latent heat transfer due to bubble formations and departure, and bubbles originated on the lower tubes (bottom part) sliding along the sides of the upper tubes (upper part), which work together and result in the so-called bundle effect. The two-phase flow in the upper part of the bundle is affected by the lower part of the bundle, and thus when the same heat flux is applied to each tube of a bundle, the boiling heat transfer coefficient (HTC) is observed to be increasing along with the bundle height. This enhancement will disappear when heat flux further increases and fully developed nucleate boiling is reached. The bundle effect is usually quantitatively defined as the ratio of the overall or averaged HTC of the tube bundle to the HTC of an isolated single tube under the same heat flux. The main influential variables on the bundle effect are fluid materials, bundle geometry, tube’s surface characteristics, operating conditions, nucleate boiling contribution, the corresponding flow regimes, and the onset of dryout.

The bundle effect tends to be more prominent on plain or low finned tube bundles than modern enhanced tube bundles which are dominated by heat flux and subsurface structures (Liu and Qiu, 2002, Gorgy and Eckels, 2012). Cornwell and Schüller, 1982, Cornwell, 1990a, Cornwell, 1990b did several fundamental studies on bubbly flow boiling on the smooth tube bundle. Cornwell and Schüller (1982) experimentally investigated the bubble sliding and growth near the top of a horizontal reboiler tube bundle using high-speed photography and confirmed that sliding bubbles could account for the enhancement of heat transfer observed at the upper tubes of bundles. Cornwell (1990b) dissociated the total heat transfer of nucleate boiling in three constituent parts: liquid convection, bubble formation and growth, and “sliding bubble” mechanism. Cornwell (1990a) further examined the effects of sliding bubbles on heat transfer in tube bundles using the dryness fraction and analyzed the corresponding local mechanism. It was found that the disruption of the liquid boundary layer played a more critical role than evaporation of the microlayer under sliding bubbles in the heat transfer enhancement. Hahne and Müller, 1983, Hahne et al., 1991 studied saturated pool boiling over finned tube bundles. Both the pool geometry and bundle configuration effects were discussed. Liu and Qiu, 2004, Liu and Qiu, 2006 investigated the boiling of pure water and water-salt mixture over smooth tubes and enhanced tubes in in-line and staggered bundles with different tube spacing. The bundle enhancement was observed on a compact tube bundle, and the boiling heat transfer rate increased with decreasing tube spacing. Ribatski et al. (2008) recommended correlation for bundle effect in wide ranges of system parameters. Some representative studies on boiling heat transfer in tube bundles are listed in Table 1.

Many literature reviews related to boiling phenomena over a single tube, cylindrical surfaces or tube bundles were published in the past, such as Collier and Thome, 1994, Browne and Bansal, 1999, Casciaro and Thome, 2001, Ribatski and Thome, 2005, Ribatski and Thome, 2007, and Swain and Das (2014). There are also some review works released in the past decade that focused on some specialized areas. Ciloglu and Bolukbasi (2015) reviewed the pool boiling of nanofluids. Abbas et al. (2017c) studied correlations for outside boiling of ammonia on single tube and bundle. Gorenflo et al. (2014) reviewed prediction methods for pool boiling heat transfer. Leong et al. (2017) summarized the boiling of dielectric fluids on enhanced surfaces. The latest review regarding boiling over tube bundle was conducted by Swain and Das (2014) which intensively discussed the effects of tube spacing, bundle geometry, surface characteristics and operating conditions on HTCs and bundle effect. Swain and Das (2014) also reviewed the industrial scale studies on boiling inside two-phase shell and tube heat exchangers.

Many studies with more profound and meticulous views on boiling heat transfer over tube bundles were published during the past couple of years. The previous reviews about bundle boiling mainly concentrated on experimental studies on horizontal bundles, while more investigations on boiling over vertical bundles, inclined bundles, and special-shaped bundles were reported in recent years based on the increasingly diverse industrial applications. For the sake of a more comprehensive cognition of the boiling phenomena, updated information of the recent development in the area of bundle boiling is required and will be helpful to the devising of future research work as well as the state-of-the-art design of efficient and economical heat transfer devices. This paper presents a review of studies published during the past five years on pre-critical heat flux (pre-CHF) boiling heat transfer over tube bundles, covering natural and forced convection through multiple bundle geometries under a wide range of operating conditions. The publications that have already been reviewed by Swain and Das (2014) and other authors will not be intensively discussed in the present review.

Section snippets

Flow patterns of two-phase flow in tube bundles involving boiling

The configuration of a tube array constrains the motion of gas bubbles as they rise and hit the tube bundle, and when boiling is involved, there are bubble formation and movement on the tube walls, which make the two-phase flow through the tube bundle quite intricate. Moreover, the distribution of the heat transfer coefficients over a tube bundle is not uniform but depends on the specific position and bundle layout, so that the corresponding bubble dynamics and two-phase flow could also vary

Boiling heat transfer over plain tube bundles

In this section, investigations concerning pool boiling and forced flow boiling heat transfer of common fluids (excluding metal fluids) over plain tube/rod bundles are critically discussed. The main characteristics of the reviewed experimental studies are described in Table 3. It has been quite well established in the literature that boiling heat transfer coefficient generally increases with the increasing heat flux and the HTC increases from the bottom tube towards the top tube in a horizontal

Boiling heat transfer over tube bundles with enhanced surfaces

Surface characteristics of heated surfaces are among the most influential factors in the boiling heat transfer in a tube bundle. Parameters such as active nucleation site density, bubble departure diameter and frequency all tightly bound to surface characteristics, such as surface roughness, wettability, and porosity. Higher surface roughness may enhance the active nucleation site density and thus improve the nucleate boiling heat transfer (Webb, 1981; Kim et al., 2016). Wang and Dhir (1993)

Conclusions

This work presents a comprehensive review of recently published investigations on the heat transfer during pre-CHF boiling over plain and enhanced tube bundles which is significant to the industrial design of shell and tube heat exchanger. The main conclusions drawn from the present literature review are as follows:

  • 1.

    The objective approaches measuring local void fraction using time-series signals are suggested to determine the two-phase flow patterns in tube bundles. The transitions between flow

Recommendations for future studies

The review suggests that more experimental studies on boiling two-phase flow over various bundle geometries and more test fluids (hydrocarbons and refrigerants) are required to establish a profound understanding of flow boiling regimes transition over tube bundles. Experimental and analytical studies on the development of local HTC correlations with broad applicability are required for the reliable design of heat exchangers. The influences of in-tube hot fluid flow on the external boiling heat

Declaration of Competing Interest

The authors declare that they have no known competing financial interests or personal relationships that could have appeared to influence the work reported in this paper.

Acknowledgments

The financial support from the Fundamental Research Funds for the Central Universities of China, China (No. 45000-18841210), the Hong Kong Early Career Scheme Grant, Hong Kong (No. CityU21202114) and CityU Start-up and Equipment Grants, Hong Kong (No. 7200343 and No. 9610289) is highly appreciated.

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