Experimental Study on Two-phase Flow Boiling Pressure Drop Characteristics in Narrow Rectangular Channel

The flow boiling pressure drop characteristics of a vertical rectangular channel (2 mm×60 mm×1 000 mm) were studied under transverse uniform and non uniform heating. The test section was double-sided heating with an effective heating area of 56 mm×700 mm. Three kinds of heating power distributions (uniform, polynomial and sinusoidal) were selected, and the working fluid was deionized water. A wide range of operating conditions was obtained by varying the inlet pressure and mass flux. The results show that the pressure drop gradient decreases with the increase of saturation pressure and increases with mass flux. The influence of vapor quality on two-phase pressure drop is related to mass flux, and the transverse power distribution has an important effect on the flow boiling pressure drop. Based on the experimental data of uniform heating, the existing two-phase pressure drop prediction model was evaluated. The homogeneous model using the equivalent viscosity assumption significantly underestimated the experimental values, and the data dispersion is relatively large. The Müller-Steinhagen and Heck and Li and Wu formulas are found to be the best with mean absolute errors of 11.8% and 12.3%, and most of predicted values are within ±20% error band. In this study, a new correlation based on the form of Müller-Steinhagen and Heck formula was proposed, and the Bond number Bo was introduced to consider the effect of surface tension. The prediction error of the new correlation for experimental data is within 8% error band.