FORCED CONVECTIVE BOILING IN HORIZONTAL TUBE BUNDLES

Experimental studies of crossflow boiling on a horizontal tube at various mass fluxes, local flow qualities and geometric arrangements are investigated. Since abundant information is available for the boiling on a single tube in a pool but it is still not clear whether this information may be applicable to tubes in bundles, the present study is therefore performed on three different conditions, namely: a heated tube in a channel; a heated tube in a non-heated, in-line tube bundle; and a heated tube in a heated, in-line tube bundle. The different heat transfer results between a single tube in a channel and a tube in a non-heated bundle, and between a non-heated bundle and a heated bundle are discussed in terms of the different flow field geometry and thermal environment respectively due to the presence of different structures and the heating conditions near the tube. A modified Chen's correlation is established to predict the heat transfer of a single tube in a channel or in a bundle. The correlation is also in good agreement with other data in the literature.