Study on onset of nucleate boiling with screw tube for fusion reactor application

The onset of nucleate boiling (ONB) is the point at which the heat transfer mechanism in fluids changes and is one of the thermo-hydraulic factors that must be considered when establishing a cooling system operation strategy. Because the high heat flux of several MW m−2, which is loaded within a tokamak, is applied under a one-side heating condition, it is necessary to determine a correlative relation that can predict ONB under special heating conditions. In this study, the ONB of a one-side-heated screw tube was experimentally analyzed via a subcooled flow boiling experiment. The helical nut structure of the screw tube flow path wall allows for improved heat transfer performance relative to plain tubes, providing a screw tube with a 53.98% higher ONB than a plain tube. The effects of the system parameters on the ONB heat flux were analyzed based on the changes in the heat transfer mechanism, with the results indicating that the flow rate and degree of subcooling are proportional to the ONB heat flux because increasing these factors improves the forced convection heat transfer and increases the condensation rate, respectively. However, it was observed that the liquid surface tension and latent heat decrease as the pressure increases, leading to a decrease in the ONB heat flux. An evaluation of the predictive performance of existing ONB correlations revealed that most have high error rates because they were developed based on ONB experiments on micro-channels or plain tubes and not under one-side high heat load conditions. To address this, we used dimensional analysis based on Python code to develop new ONB correlations that reflect the influence of system parameters.