Natural and forced convection film boiling over axisymmetric bodies at high temperatures

Natural and forced convection film boiling over axisymmetric bodies is analysed in the case of high surface temperatures. In these conditions, the global heat transfer is no more driven by simple conduction through the vapour film, an assumption that is commonly made in film boiling modelling for simplicity reasons, but rather by convection through this film. Therefore a mathematical method was developed which enables a full description of the vapour flow by including the inertia and convection terms of the momentum and energy equations. It is based on classical two-phase boundary layer integral methods where polynomial functions of order 5 are used to describe the velocity and the temperature profiles in the vapour flow. Also, a simple scaling analysis is described in order to understand when inertial and convective effects in the vapour flow become important. It is shown for example that for any given fluid, these effects will become predominant even at a low surface superheat when the fluid pressure is increased near its critical pressure. The developed models are then compared with three simpler models: a similar model which uses order 3 polynomial functions, a model where the convective effects are modelled by just using an effective latent heat, and an even simpler model where convection and inertia in the vapour film are not considered at all. It is shown on some examples with very high surface temperatures that if convective and inertial effects are totally neglected, the global heat transfer is clearly underestimated compared to the ones calculated with the two other models, which are quite similar. However, if other important parameters such as vapour production or vapour film thickness at the front stagnation point are calculated, the results given by the model with the effective latent heat diverge from those given by the developed models. (author)