Flow boiling heat transfer in volumetrically heated packed bed

The volumetrically heated packed bed has been widely utilized in modern industry. However, due to the variability and randomness of packed bed channels, flow boiling heat transfer characteristics becomes complex, and there are no published research regarding this topic. To study flow boiling heat transfer characteristics of volumetrically heated packed beds, electromagnetic induction heating method is used to heat oxidized carbon steel balls adopted to stack the packed bed, with water as coolant in the experiment. The experimental results indicate that heat flux at onset of nucleate boiling (ONB) increases as mass flux and inlet subcooling are increased. A new correlation is developed to predict the ONB heat flux qONB in volumetrically heated packed bed, the predictions by which agree well with the experimental data, and the deviation remains less than 15%. Subcooled flow boiling heat transfer coefficient (hsub) increases with increasing mass flux, and equilibrium quality is slightly affected by heat flux. The saturated flow boiling heat transfer coefficient (hsat) increases with mass flux and equilibrium quality when equilibrium quality is lower than about 0.05, while the nucleate boiling is suppressed when the equilibrium quality exceeds a certain value.