An Experimental Investigation on Flow Boiling of Ethylene-Glycol/Water Mixtures

Abstract

Mixtures of ethylene glycol and water are used in cooling the engines in automotive applications. Heat is transferred essentially under subcooled flow boiling conditions as the mixture flows over the hot surfaces, which are at temperatures well above the local saturation temperature of the mixture. Very little information is available in the literature on the subcooled flow boiling characteristics of this mixture. The present work focuses on obtaining experimental heat transfer data for water and its mixtures containing ethylene-glycol (0 to 40 percent mass fraction, limited by the maximum allowable temperature in the present setup) in the subcooled flow boiling region. The experimental setup is designed to obtain local heat transfer coefficients over a small circular aluminum heater surface, 9.5-mm in diameter, placed at the bottom 40-mm wide wall of a rectangular channel 3-mm×40-mm in cross-section. Available models for (a) subcooled flow boiling of pure liquids and (b) saturated flow boiling of binary mixtures are extended to model the subcooled flow boiling of binary mixtures.