An Experimental Study on Heat Transfer Characteristics of Porous Media Subjected to Submerged Two-Phase Jet Impingement

With the constant innovation of technology and the need for more power generation, the need for improved methods of heat transfer are also needed. These innovations have always driven the research into new and improved methods of heat transfer. The topics covered in this research mainly being porous media, submerged two-phase jet impingement and boiling have all been seen to create improvements in cooling but have not been used in conjunction with each other. Using this combination to find the possible heat transfer improvement is the goal of this research. Experiments are done in both a non-boiling and boiling scenario. This allowed for verification that the two-phase flow had an effect on the surface before performing a boiling experiment. Two surfaces were tested, these were a plain surface and a columnar post-wick porous structure. For both sets of experiments, water flow rates were chosen from Reynolds numbers of 729 and 2929. The air flow rates were calculated using values of the volumetric quality () that ranged from 0 ≤ ≤ 0.9 and the previously mentioned water flow rates. The results of this experiment were quantified by looking at the heat transfer coefficient (HTC) compared to the change in volumetric quality for both experiments. The non-boiling experiment showed that the added two-phase impinging jet created improvements in the HTC of porous media. An improvement of 81.94% over a single-phase jet was observed at a volumetric quality of = 0.9. The boiling experiment showed that the added two-phase impinging jet made minimal improvements on each surface. The plain surface saw an improvement of 9.50% over a single-phase jet at a volumetric quality of =0.9. The post-wick surface saw a maximum improvement of only 2.94% at a volumetric quality of = 0.7.