Development of Bubble Lift-off Diameter Model for Subcooled Boiling Flows

A lot of models and correlations for predicting the bubble departure/lift-off diameter are available in the literature. Most of them were developed based on a hydrodynamic principle, which balances forces acting on a bubble at the departure/lift-off point. One difficulty of these models is lack of essential information, such as bubble front velocity, liquid velocity, or relative velocity, to estimate the active force elements. Hence, the lift-off bubble diameter predicted by these hydrodynamic-controlled models may be suffered a large uncertainty. In contract to the hydrodynamic approach, there are few models developed based on the heat transfer aspect. By balancing the heat conducted through a microlayer underneath a bubble with the heat taken away by condensation at the upper part of the bubble, Unal derived a heat-controlled model of the bubble lift-off diameter. This model did not consider the role of superheat liquid layer surrounding the bubble as well as the effect of liquid properties on the heat transfer process. Beside these two approaches, several empirical correlations have been proposed based on dimensionless analyses for measured experimental databases. The application of these correlations to different experiments conditions is, of course, questionable because of the lack of physical bases. Regarding the heat transfer accompanied by a vapor bubble, four involved heat transfer regions surrounding this bubble can be defined as in Fig. 1. These are dry region, microlayer, superheated liquid layer (SpLL) and subcooled liquid layer (SbLL). The existing of the microlayer is confirmed by experiments, and it is considered to be very effective in the heat transfer. Sernas and Hoper defined five types of the microlayer and indicated that the microlayer acting as a very thick liquid layer gives a best prediction for the bubble growth. However, beside the microlayer, the SpLL might play an important role in the heat transfer if its effective heat transfer area is large. To the best of our understanding, the SpLL must be involved in the growth of the bubble, and its contribution to the bubble diameter at the lift-off point should be qualified. In this paper, a new bubble lift-off diameter model, in which the SpLL contribution is incorporated, is proposed and adopted to analyze two available experimental databases measured by Prodanovic et al. and Situ et al.. Three existing models/correlations, i. e. Unal's model, and Prodanovic and Chu's correlations are also applied to these databases to give a comparison with the proposed model