Modeling of annular-mist flow during mixtures boiling

• Mixture boiling process is studied numerically by the annular-mist flow model.
• The coupled thermodynamic and hydrodynamic non-equilibrium effects are considered.
• The effect of initial entrainment fraction and nucleation-induced entrainment is studied.
• The sensitivity analysis for eleven parameters is carried out.
• The effect of non-uniform heat flux distribution is investigated.

This work presents a one-dimensional, steady-state, three-field model to simulate the annular-mist flow regime during mixtures boiling process. The governing equations with the additional constitutive models are solved to predict the occurrence of the film dryout. The effect of various setups for the initial entrainment fraction and the nucleation-induced entrainment on the predicted dryout quality is investigated. It is found that the result of the model considering both a large initial entrainment and a non-negligible nucleation-induced entrainment shows the best agreement with the experimental data from the literature. The sensitivity analysis of the total eleven semi-empirical/empirical parameters is carried out. The dryout for the mixtures boiling under non-uniform heat flux distributions is studied, and it is observed that the local critical heat flux and the dryout location are almost linearly dependent on the mixture compositions under non-uniform heat flux distributions.