Effects of pulse width and mass flux on microscale flow boiling under pulse heating

A Pt microheater (140 × 100 μm2) is fabricated on a glass wafer and enclosed in a silicon microchannel of trapezoidal cross section by MEMS technology. With the aid of a high-speed CCD and data acquisition system, subcooled flow boiling phenomena and temperature response on the surface of the microheater under pulse heating are observed and recorded. Experiments are conducted for six pulse widths (50 μs, 100 μs, 200 μs, 600 μs, 1 ms, and 2 ms) under different mass and heat fluxes. With increasing heat flux at a fixed pulse width and different mass fluxes, four flow regimes including single phase, nucleate boiling, film boiling and dry out are identified. Since flow boiling regimes are relatively independent of mass flux, correlation equations based on experimental data for the transitional heat flux of different flow boiling regimes are obtained in terms of pulse width only. It is also found that pulse width and mass flux have little influence on boiling inception time, and the classical analytical solution for the nucleation inception time in terms of heat flux is verified experimentally.