Influence of wall material on nucleate pool boiling of liquid nitrogen

In this paper, nucleate pool boiling curves of saturated nitrogen under ambient pressure are experimentally obtained on a horizontal flat surface and the effect of three different wall materials (copper, aluminum, stainless steel) is evaluated. The tested surfaces are mechanically polished to avoid any roughness effect. Hysteresis behavior has been observed for the copper and aluminum surfaces, while the results for stainless steel are difficult to assess. The critical heat flux is also analyzed and compared by taking into account the thermal effusivity of the different materials. Finally, experimental results are compared against the most common empirical correlations for nucleate pool boiling heat transfer.