Effect of void fraction models on the two-phase friction factor of R134a during condensation in vertical downward flow in a smooth tube

The void fraction of R134a condensing inside a vertical smooth tube is experimentally investigated in this study. The vertical test section is a 0.5 m long countercurrent flow double tube heat exchanger with refrigerant flowing down the inner tube and cooling water flowing upward in the annulus. The inner tube is made from smooth copper tubing and has an 8.1 mm inner diameter. The test runs are done at an average saturated condensing temperature of 40 °C. The average qualities are between 0.8 and 0.99 while the mass fluxes are 300 kg m^− 2s^− 1 and the heat fluxes are between 22 and 39.8 kW m^− 2. The void fractions are indirectly determined using relevant measured data together with various void fraction models and correlations reported in the open literature. The friction factors obtained from various void fraction models and correlations are compared with each other and also with those determined from graphical information provided by Bergelin et al. The effect of void fraction alteration on the momentum pressure drop is also presented.     

Effect of void fraction models on the film thickness of R134a during downward condensation in a vertical smooth tube

In the present study, the void fraction and film thickness of pure R-134a flowing downwards in a vertical condenser tube are indirectly determined using relevant measured data together with an annular flow model and various void fraction models reported in the open literature. The vertical test section is a countercurrent flow double tube heat exchanger with refrigerant flowing down in the inner tube and cooling water flowing upward in the annulus. The inner tube is made from smooth copper tubing of 9.52 mm outer diameter with a length of 0.5 m. The experimental runs are carried out at average saturated condensing temperatures of 40 and 50 °C, and mass velocities are around 456 kg m^− 2 s^− 1, over the vapour quality range 0.82–0.93, while the heat fluxes are between 45.60 and 50.90 kW m^− 2. Analysis based on simple void fraction models of the annular flow pattern are presented for forced convection condensation of pure R134a, taking into account the effect of the different saturation temperatures at high mass flux conditions. The comparisons of calculated film thickness show that the void fraction models of Spedding and Chen, and Chisholm and Armand are the most accurate ones with the experimental data due to their low deviation with Whalley's annular flow model over 35 void fraction models presented in this paper.     

Experimental analysis for the determination of the convective heat transfer coefficient by measuring pressure drop directly during annular condensation flow of R134a in a vertical smooth tube

This study investigated the direct relationship between the measured condensation pressure drop and convective heat transfer coefficient of R134a flowing downward inside a vertical smooth copper tube having an inner diameter of 8.1 mm and a length of 500 mm during annular flow. R134a and water were used as working fluids on the tube side and annular side of a double tube heat exchanger, respectively. Condensation experiments were performed at mass fluxes of 260, 300, 340, 400, 456 and 515 kg m⁻² s⁻¹ in the high mass flux region of R134a. The condensing temperatures were around 40 and 50 °C; the heat fluxes were between 10.16 and 66.61 kW m⁻². Paliwoda’s analysis, which focused mainly on the determination of the two-phase flow factor and two-phase length of evaporators and condensers, was adapted to the in-tube condensation phenomena in the test section to determine the condensation heat transfer coefficient, heat flux, two-phase length and pressure drop experimentally by means of a large number of data points obtained under various experimental conditions.     

Experimental investigation of heat transfer coefficient of R134a during condensation in vertical downward flow at high mass flux in a smooth tube

The two-phase heat transfer coefficients of pure HFC-134a condensing inside a smooth tube-in-tube heat exchanger are experimentally investigated. The test section is a 0.5 m long double tube with refrigerant flowing in the inner tube and cooling water flowing in the annulus. The inner tube is constructed from smooth copper tubing of 9.52 mm outer diameter and 8.1 mm inner diameter. The test runs are performed at average saturation condensing temperatures between 40–50 °C. The mass fluxes are between 260 and 515 kg m^− 2s^− 1 and the heat fluxes are between 11.3 and 55.3 kW m^− 2. The quality of the refrigerant in the test section is calculated using the temperature and pressure obtained from the experiment. The average heat transfer coefficient of the refrigerant is determined by applying an energy balance based on the energy transferred from the test section. The effects of heat flux, mass flux and condensation temperature on the heat transfer coefficients are also discussed. Eleven well-known correlations for annular flow are compared to each other using a large amount of data obtained from various experimental conditions. A new correlation for the condensation heat transfer coefficient is proposed for practical applications.     

Two-phase friction factor in vertical downward flow in high mass flux region of refrigerant HFC-134a during condensation

The two-phase pressure drop of the pure refrigerant HFC-134a during condensation inside a vertical tube-in-tube heat exchanger was investigated. The double tube test section was 0.5 m long with refrigerant flowing in the inner tube and cooling water flowing in the annulus. The inner tube was constructed from smooth copper tubing of 8.1 mm inner diameter and 9.52 mm outer diameter. The test runs were performed at average condensing temperatures of 40–50 °C. The mass fluxes were between 260 and 515 kg m^− 2 s^− 1 and the heat fluxes between 11.3 and 55.3 kW m^− 2. The quality of the refrigerant in the test section was calculated using the temperature and pressure obtained from the experiment. The pressure drop across the test section was directly measured by a differential pressure transducer. A new correlation for the two-phase friction factor of R134a flow is proposed by means of the equivalent Reynolds number model. The effects of heat flux, mass flux and condensation temperature on the pressure drop are also discussed.     

Shell-and-tube evaporator model performance with different two-phase flow heat transfer correlations. Experimental analysis using R134a and R1234yf

This work presents a model of a shell-and-tube evaporator using R1234yf and R134a as working fluids. The model uses the effectiveness-NTU method to predict the evaporation pressure and the refrigerant and secondary fluid temperatures at the evaporator outlet, using as inputs the geometry of the evaporator, the refrigerant mass flow rate and evaporator inlet enthalpy, and the secondary fluid volumetric flow rate and evaporator inlet temperature. The model performance is evaluated using different two-phase flow heat transfer correlations through model outputs, comparing predicted and experimental data. The output parameter with maximum deviations between the predicted and experimental data is the evaporating pressure, being the deviations in outlet temperatures less than 3%. The evaporator model using Kandlikar's correlation obtains the highest precision and the lowest absolute mean error, with 4.87% in the evaporating pressure, 0.45% in the refrigerant outlet temperature and 0.03% in the secondary fluid outlet temperature.     

The effect of heating direction on flow boiling heat transfer of R134a in micro-channels

This paper presents effects of heating directions on heat transfer performance of R134a flow boiling in micro-channel heat sink.The heat sink has 30 parallel rectangular channels with cross-sectional dimensions of 500μm width 500μm depth and 30mm length.The experimental operation condition ranges of the heat flux and the mass flux were 13.48 to 82.25 W/cm2 and 373.3 to 1244.4 kg/m2s respectively.The vapor quality ranged from 0.07 to 0.93.The heat transfer coefficients of top heating and bottom heating both were up to 25 kW/m2 K.Two dominate transfer mechanisms of nucleate boiling and convection boiling were observed according to boiling curves.The experimental results indicated that the heat transfer coefficient of bottom heating was 13.9％ higher than top heating in low heat flux,while in high heat flux,the heat transfer coefficient of bottom heating was 9.9％.higher than the top heating,because bubbles were harder to divorce the heating wall.And a modified correlation was provided to predict heat transfer of top heating.     

Artificial neural network techniques for the determination of condensation heat transfer characteristics during downward annular flow of R134a inside a vertical smooth tube

In this study, the best artificial intelligence method is investigated to estimate the measured convective heat transfer coefficient and pressure drop of R134a flowing downward inside a vertical smooth copper tube having an inner diameter of 8.1 mm and a length of 500 mm during annular flow numerically. R134a and water are used as working fluids in the tube side and annular side of a double tube heat exchanger, respectively. The ANN training sets have the experimental data of in-tube condensation tests including six different mass fluxes of R134a such as 260, 300, 340, 400, 456 and 515 kg m^− 2 s^− 1, two different saturation temperatures of R134a such as 40 and 50 °C and heat fluxes ranging from 10.16 to 66.61 kW m^− 2. The quality of the refrigerant in the test section is calculated considering the temperature and pressure obtained from the experiment. The pressure drop across the test section is directly measured by a differential pressure transducer. Input of the ANNs are the measured values of test section such as mass flux, heat flux, the temperature difference between the tube wall and saturation temperature, average vapor quality, while the outputs of the ANNs are the experimental condensation heat transfer coefficient and measured pressure drop in the analysis. Condensation heat transfer characteristics of R134a are modeled to decide the best approach using several artificial neural network (ANN) methods such as multilayer perceptron (MLP), radial basis networks (RBFN), generalized regression neural network (GRNN) and adaptive neuro-fuzzy inference system (ANFIS). Elimination process of the ANN methods is performed by means of 183 data points, divided into two sets randomly, obtained in the experiments. Sets of test and training/validation include 33 and 120/30 data points respectively for the elimination process. Validation process, in terms of various experimental conditions, is done by means of 368 experimental data points having 68 data points for test set and 300 data points for training set. In training phase, 5-fold cross validation is used to determine the best value of ANNs control parameters. The ANNs performances were measured by means of relative error criteria with the usage of unknown test sets. The performance of the method of multi layer perceptron (MLP) with 5-13-1 architecture and radial basis function networks (RBFN) were found to be in good agreement, predicting the experimental condensation heat transfer coefficient and pressure drop with their deviations being within the range of ± 5% for all tested conditions. Dependency of outputs of the ANNs from input values is also investigated in the paper.     

Examination of heat transfer correlations and a model for flow boiling of R134a in small diameter tubes

Analysis of various existing correlations including a three-zone evaporation model is made using a comparison with recent experimental results obtained in this study. Flow boiling heat transfer experiments were conducted with two stainless steel tubes of internal diameter 4.26 mm and 2.01 mm. The working fluid was R134a and parameters were varied in the range: mass flux 100–500 kg/m²s; pressure 8–12 bar; quality up to 0.9; heat flux 13–150 kW/m². The local heat transfer coefficient was independent of vapour quality when this was less than about 40–50% in the 4.26 mm tube and 20–30% in the 2.01 mm tube. Local transient dryout was deduced when the quality was above these values. Furthermore, at high heat flux values the heat transfer coefficient decreased with vapour quality for the entire quality range indicating early occurrence of dryout.Existing correlations, which are based on large tube boiling processes, do not predict the present small diameter data to a satisfactory degree. A better agreement is observed with the recent, state-of-the-art, three-zone evaporation model. However, the model does not predict the effect of diameter and the partial dryout. Nevertheless, the observation suggests that the flow pattern based modelling approach performs at least as well as empirical correlations that are based on macroscale modelling. Aspects of the model that need further consideration are also proposed in this study.     

Improved flow pattern map for accurate prediction of the heat transfer coefficients during condensation of R-134a in smooth horizontal tubes and within the low-mass flux range

This paper presents an improved flow pattern map for predicting the heat transfer coefficients during condensation of R-134a inside a smooth horizontal tube. Experimental tests were conducted over the low-mass flux range of 75–300 kg/m² s, at a nominal saturation temperature of 40 °C, and with the test section vapour qualities ranging from 0.76 down to 0.03. This represents points within the annular, intermittent and stratified flow regimes. The results were used to modify the Thome–El Hajal flow pattern map to include a transition region between the stratified-wavy and annular or intermittent flow regimes. The revised flow pattern-based heat transfer correlation predicted the experimental data to a mean deviation of less than 6%.     

Heat transfer performance of a flexible looped heat pipe using R134a as a working fluid: Proposal for a method to predict the maximum heat transfer rate of FLHP

This paper presents the heat transfer performance of a Flexible Looped Heat Pipe (FLHP) using R134a as a working fluid. In our evaluation system, an evaporator and a condenser are connected by long flexible tubes with a diameter of 3 mm, and the total piping length of this looped heat pipe system is approximately 7500 mm. We selected porous Teflon with an effective pore diameter of 2r_cw = 1.2 µm to overcome high gravitational heads. Elevation of the evaporator above the condenser ΔH = H_e ? H_c) was changed in three conditions [ Top heat mode (ΔH = +1 m), Horizontal mode (ΔH = 0), Bottom heat mode (ΔH = ?1 m)] considering the terrestrial application and the influence of gravity on the FLHP performance was investigated. FLHP provided high thermal transport capacities over long distances through small cross‐sectional flexible tubes compared with conventional heat pipes. We also proposed an analysis method to predict the maximum heat transfer rate of FLHP. © 2003 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. Heat Trans Asian Res, 32(4): 306–318, 2003; Published online in Wiley InterScience ( www.interscience.wiley.com ). DOI 10.1002/htj.10093     

The application of a validated numerical model to predict the energy conservation potential of using phase change materials in the fabric of a building

Phase change materials absorb a large amount of energy as latent heat at a constant phase transition temperature and are thus used for passive heat storage and temperature control, example applications include electronics, and storage of perishable items. Encapsulated phase change materials incorporated into gypsum wallboards of buildings may be suitable for absorbing solar energy directly, reducing temperature rise. Improvement in human comfort is to be expected due to a decrease in the frequency and magnitude of internal air temperature swings, maintaining the temperature closer to the desired set temperature passively for a long period of time.This paper summarises the results of a detailed theoretical investigation and analysis of thermal energy storage and temperature control achieved using passive building construction elements incorporating phase change materials. The predictions detail the effects of using various quantities of different PCM materials with phase change temperatures of 28 and 43 °C incorporated into a selection of wall constructions for selected ambient conditions of temperature and insolation. From this parametric study, optimum arrangements are proposed.