Forced convective boiling heat transfer of water in vertical rectangular narrow channel

• Chen correlation cannot well predict the coefficient of rectangular channel.
• Kim and Mudawar correlation is the best one among the Chen type correlations.
• Lazarek and Black correlation predicted 7.0% of data within the ±30% error band.
• The new correlation can well predict the coefficient with a small MAE of 14.4%.

In order to research the characteristics of boiling flows in a vertical rectangular narrow channel, a series of convective boiling heat transfer experiments are performed. The test section is made of stainless steel with an inner diameter of 2 × 40 mm and heated length of 1100 mm. The 3194 experimental data points are obtained for a heat flux range of 10–700 kW/m2, a mass flux range of 200–2400 kg/m2 s, a system pressure range of 0.1–2.5 MPa, and a quality range of 0–0.8. Eighteen prediction models are used to predict the flow boiling heat transfer coefficient of the rectangular narrow channel and the predicted value is compared against the database including 3194 data points, the results show that Chen type correlations and Lazarek and Black type correlations are not suitable for the rectangular channel very much. The Kim and Mudawar correlation is the best one among the 18 models. A new correlation is developed based on the superposition concept of nucleate boiling and convective boiling. the new correlation is shown to provide a good prediction against the database, evidenced by an overall MAE of 14.4%, with 95.2% and 98.6% of the data falling within ±30% and ±35% error bands, respectively.