Experimental and Methodological Research on Pressure Drop of Flow Boiling in Narrow Rectangular Channel

On the background of the miniaturization of heat exchanger, experimental investigation and analysis of the pressure drop of flow boiling in narrow rectangular channel were conducted. Six correlations for the two-phase friction pressure drop were evaluated against the experimental data. The results show that the correlations for conventional channel poorly predict the results. While the Sun-Mishima and Zhang-Mishima correlations developed for narrow channel are better than other correlations. In the meantime, the constant C in the Chisholm equation for calculating the two-phase friction pressure drop shows the exponential trend against Martinelli parameter X for different mass fluxes. Therefore, a new correlation was developed for calculating the two-phase frictional multiplier and the evaluation shows that it’s better than the other evaluated correlations.