A New Correlation of Heat Transfer Coefficients for Flow Boiling in Serrated Channels

Abstract

Abstract Compact plate-fin heat exchangers with serrated channels have been widely used in a variety of industrial systems. However, few correlations for flow boiling heat transfer in serrated channels are available in the literature, and their prediction accuracy needs to be improved. This paper presents a database containing 1184 experimental data points of saturated flow boiling heat transfer in serrated channels, which is compiled from six sources covered by eight published articles involving four fluids. The parameter range it covers is the hydraulic diameters from 1.19 to 5.15 mm, mass fluxes from 12.5 to 210 kg/(m2 s), heat fluxes from 6 to 83.4 kWm2, saturation pressures from 101.3 to 800 kPa, and vapor qualities from 0 to 0.96. Based on the database, nine existing correlations of flow boiling heat transfer coefficient (HTC) developed for serrated channels were evaluated. There are only three having the mean absolute deviation (MAD) less than 100% against the database, among which the best one has an MAD of 26.0%. A new HTC correlation for flow boiling in serrated channels is developed, which has an MAD of 13.7% and predicts 78.7% of the database within ± 20%, far better than the best existing one.