Modeling film boiling within chimney-structured porous media and heat pipes

A porous medium with separated paths for liquid and vapor flows does not fail even after part of the porous medium is dried out. Instead, a vapor film resides within the porous medium, and it grows very slowly. This heat transfer regime was named as “confined film-boiling regime” in this study, and a heat transfer model for this regime was suggested in this paper. Especially, this paper mainly focuses on heat transfer of a CRUD (Chalk River Unidentified Deposit), which is a naturally occurring porous medium found in nuclear reactors. In the present model, the balance between capillary pressure and pressure drops of liquid and vapor flows determined thickness of the vapor film. In addition, we assumed that capillary pressure was changed with applied heat flux. This assumption was validated with a planar heat pipe case: the root-mean-square-error (RMSE) was 16% for the model with the heat flux dependent capillary pressure, while one for a model with the constant capillary pressure was 790%. Furthermore, this approach also turned out to be valid for the case of the CRUD: the model predicted the wall superheat during the film boiling of the CRUD, and its relative error was only within 20% when it was compared with the measured wall superheats. Finally, sensitivity analysis for CRUD parameters found that the heat transfer performance of the CRUD is largely sensitive to chimney density and pore size.