Measurement of heat transfer effectiveness during collision of a Leidenfrost droplet with a heated wall - 15447

Droplet-wall collision heat transfer during dispersed flow film boiling plays a role in predicting cooling rate and peak cladding temperature of overheated fuels during reflood following a LOCA accident in nuclear power plants. This study aims at experimentally studying effects of collision velocity and angle, as dynamic characteristics of the colliding droplet, on heat transfer. The experiments were performed by varying collision velocity from 0.2 to 1.5 m/s and collision angle between the droplet path and the wall in the range from 30 to 90 degrees under atmosphere condition. A single droplet was impinged on an infrared-opaque Pt film deposited on an infrared-transparent sapphire plate, which combination permits to measure temperature distribution of the collision surface using a high-speed infrared camera from below. The instantaneous local surface heat flux was obtained by solving transient heat conduction equation for the heated substrate using the measured surface temperature data as the boundary condition of the collision surface. Total heat transfer amount of a single droplet collision was calculated by integrating the local heat flux distribution on the effective heat transfer area during the collision time. The obtained results confirmed the finding from the previous studies that with increasing collision velocity, the heat transfer effectiveness increases due to the increase of the heat transfer area and the local heat flux value. Interestingly, it was found that as collision angle of a droplet with a constant collision velocity decreases from 90 to 50 degrees and thus the vertical velocity component of the collision decreases, the total heat transfer amount per a collision increases. It was observed that the droplet colliding with an angle less than 90 degrees slides on the surface during the collision and the resulting collision area is larger than that in the normal collision. On the other hand, further decrease of collision angle below 40 degrees resulted in a significant reduction in the total heat transfer amount, likely as the vertical velocity component of the collision is too small to spread out the colliding droplet on the wall. Consequently, both the collision area and resident time are seriously reduced, resulting in the small total heat transfer. (authors)