Abstract
Heat pumps are an integral part of the future sustainable building energy systems and are already taking up a substantial portion of the (newly) built sector. In the evaporator, a liquid refrigerant flows that is evaporated to a vapour. Although boiling heat transfer has been researched for almost a century, no consensus is yet available in the scientific community on which (fluid) parameters affect boiling heat transfer. As new refrigerants with lower global warming potential are still being introduced, testing is required for each fluid to analyse the heat transfer performance. Using computational fluid dynamics simulations, new insights will be gathered in the behaviour of the boiling process. The goal of this research is to develop a numerical framework to simulate heat transfer during nucleate pool boiling and evaluate the influence of fluid properties and other boundary conditions on the heat transfer rates. With this framework, the heat transfer rates during nucleate pool boiling of different fluids with varying properties can be predicted, as well as the influence of boundary conditions such as the boiling surface material properties and (micro)geometry. This will enable faster and improved design of evaporators, which are essential an part of systems such as heat pump, chillers and power generation through organic Rankine cycles.
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