Skin friction and heat transfer of a vertical flat plate in film boiling flow

This paper summarizes a theoretical study of the skin friction and heat transfer characteristics from a vertical flat plate during external forced-convective film boiling. The results of this study may be useful in a variety of areas including nuclear safety assessments and hydrodynamic drag reduction. A ''mixed-convection'' boundary layer model is proposed to describe the simultaneous motion of the vapor film and liquid boundary layers. Inertial and buoyancy forces, in addition to the convective energy terms are included in this model leading to non-linear partial differential equations which describes the flow. A ''local similarity'' approach with a fourth order Runge-Kutta method is then used to obtain a solution for the model. The influence of several non-dimensional parameters including the Froude number and the liquid Jakob's number are examined