Convective boiling heat transfer and two-phase flow characteristics inside a small horizontal helically coiled tubing once-through steam generator

The pressure drop and boiling heat transfer characteristics of steam-water two-phase flow were studied in a small horizontal helically coiled tubing once-through steam generator. The generator was constructed of a 9mm ID 1Cr18Ni9Ti stainless steel tube with 292-mm coil diameter and 30-mm pitch. Experiments were performed in a range of steam qualities up to 0.95, system pressure 0.5-3.5 MPa, mass flux 236-943 kg/m^2s and heat flux 0-900 kW/m^2. A new two-phase frictional pressure drop correlation was obtained from the experimental data using Chisholm’s B-coefficient method. The boiling heat transfer was found to be dependent on both of mass flux and heat flux. This implies that both the nucleation mechanism and the convection mechanism have the same importance to forced convective boiling heat transfer in a small horizontal helically coiled tube over the full range of steam qualities (pre-critical heat flux qualities of 0.1-0.9), which is different from the situations in larger helically coiled tube where the convection mechanism dominates at qualities typically >0.1. Traditional single parameter Lockhart–Martinelli type correlations failed to satisfactorily correlate present experimental data, and in this paper a new flow boiling heat transfer correlation was proposed to better correlate the experimental data.