ARGUMENTS ON MICROSCALE BOILING DYNAMICS

Microscale boiling displays some quite unusual characteristics, such as the occurrence of so-called fictitious boiling. This article discusses some arguments on the thermodynamic and dynamic characteristics of the phase change and bubble nucleation in microchannels or microstructures. The cluster model is proposed to describe the density fluctuation in superheated liquid, and furthermore, the kinematics of a cluster are analyzed using Brownian motion. The analyses explore that the scale of microstructures has importance for the kinematics of a cluster and the boiling nucleation.