Automated high-speed video analysis of the bubble dynamics in subcooled flow boiling

Subcooled flow boiling is a commonly applied technique for achieving efficient heat transfer. In the study, an experimental investigation in the nucleate boiling regime was performed for water circulating in a closed loop at atmospheric pressure. The test-section consists of a rectangular channel with a one side heated copper strip and a very good optical access. For the optical observation of the bubble behaviour the high-speed cinematography is used. Automated image processing and analysis algorithms developed by the authors were applied for a wide range of mass flow rates and heat fluxes in order to extract characteristic length and time scales of the bubbly layer during the boiling process. Using this methodology, a huge number of bubble cycles could be analysed. The structure of the developed algorithms for the detection of the bubble diameter, the bubble lifetime, the lifetime after the detachment process and the waiting time between two bubble cycles is described. Subsequently, the results from using these automated procedures are presented. A remarkable novelty is the presentation of all results as distribution functions. This is of physical importance because the commonly applied spatial and temporal averaging leads to a loss of information and, moreover, to an unjustified deterministic view of the boiling process, which exhibits in reality a very wide spread of bubble sizes and characteristic times. The results show that the mass flux dominates the temporal bubble behaviour. An increase of the liquid mass flux reveals a strong decrease of the bubble life- and waiting time. In contrast, the variation of the heat flux has a much smaller impact. It is shown in addition that the investigation of the bubble history using automated algorithms delivers novel information with respect to the bubble lift-off probability.