Experimental study on the heat transfer performance and dimensionless correlations for R134a spray cooling system

Abstract

Spray cooling is a promising and effective cooling method, which may be used to solve the heat dissipation problem of high-power electronic components. In this paper, the influences of flow rate, sub-cooling degree, and refrigerant charge on the spray cooling heat transfer performance with R134a as the working fluid were experimentally studied. Results showed that the enhancement effect of the increase of sub-cooling degree on the heat transfer performance is very limited in this experiment. When the sub-cooling degree rises from 5 to 8 K, the heat transfer coefficient increases by 2.6% on average at lower heat flux (45.93–72.55 W/cm2). The increase of refrigerant charge can effectively improve the heat transfer performance, especially at higher heat flux (84.02–105.25 W/cm2). However, the Jacobian number decreases with the increase of the refrigerant charge, which hinders the improvement of heat transfer performance at higher heat flux. Therefore, there is an optimal refrigerant charge of 1.05 kg in this experiment. In addition, based on the experimental data, a Nusselt number dimensionless correlation of R134a solution with higher prediction accuracy was proposed.