The evaporation of vapor bubbles inside a microchannel is important to realize a device with high cooling performance. The liquid film formed on the solid surface is essential for evaporative heat transfer from solid to fluid; its formation process and heat transfer characteristics need to be investigated. The expansion process of a single vapor bubble via evaporative heat transfer in microchannels was evaluated via a numerical simulation in this study. In the calculation model, the working fluid used was saturated FC-72 at 0.1013 MPa and the channel diameter was 200 $μ$m. The superheat of the initial temperature field and wall were considered as parameters. To evaluate the heat transfer characteristics, the time variation of liquid film thickness was evaluated. The averaged liquid film thickness had a correlation with the capillary number. Additionally, the dominant heat transfer mode was estimated by decomposing the heat transfer rate into the heat-transfer rate through the liquid film, rear edge, and wake. When the superheat was low, the heat transfer mostly occurred via liquid film evaporation; the heat flux through the liquid film could be predicted using the liquid film thickness. On the other hand, in cases of higher superheat, owing to rapid expansion of the vapor bubble, no evaporative heat transfer occurred through the liquid film around the bubble head. It could be inferred from this study that the relationship between the thickness of the thermal boundary layer of the bubble and liquid film thickness is important for predicting the cooling effect of this phenomena. When the vapor bubble grows in the high superheat liquid, the rapid growth makes the liquid film thick, and the thick liquid film prevents the heat transfer between the liquid-vapor interface and heated wall.
Dynamics of vapor bubble train in flow boiling heat transfer in microchannels
State Key Laboratory of Engines, Tianjin University（天津大学内燃机燃烧学国家重点实验室）；National Industry-Education Platform of Energy Storage, Tianjin University（天津大学国家储能产教融合创新平台）
Interaction between vapor bubbles during flow boiling heat transfer in microchannels
State Key Laboratory of Engines, Tianjin University（天津大学内燃机燃烧学国家重点实验室）；National Industry-Education Platform of Energy Storage, Tianjin University（天津大学国家储能产教融合创新平台）
This work focuses on the dynamics of a train of unconfined bubbles flowing in microchan- nels. We investigate the transverse position of a train of bubbles, its velocity and the associated pressure drop when flowing in a microchannel depending on the internal forces due to viscosity, inertia and capillarity. Despite the small scales of the system, inertia, referred to as inertial migration force, play a crucial role in determining the transverse equilibrium position of the bubbles. Beside inertia and viscosity, other effects may also affect the transverse migration of bubbles such as the Maran…
This work focuses on the dissolution of a train of unconfined bubbles in cylindrical microchannels. We investigate how the mass transfer is affected by the channel and bubble sizes, distance between bubbles, diffusivity, superficial velocity, deformation of the bubble, the presence of surfactants in the limit of rigid interface and off-centred positions of the bubbles. We analyse the influence of the dimensionless numbers and especially the distance between bubbles and the Péclet number, Pe, which we vary among eight decades and identify five different dissolution regimes. We show different co…
We carry out a series of experiments with a special interest on growing and condensing processes of vapor bubble(s) injected into a subcooled pool. We examine effects of the degree of subcooling of the bulk in the pool and injection rate of the vapor into the pool. We pay their special attention to (i) abrupt collapse of the injected vapor bubble to form micrometer-scale bubbles, and (ii) interaction of adjacent vapor bubbles laterally injected to the pool through the orifices. We have found that a fine disturbance does arise on the surface of the vapor bubble just prior to its abrupt collapse…
Understand and predict the dynamics of dispersed micro-objects in microfluidics is crucial in numerous natural, industrial and technological situations. In this paper, we experimentally characterized the equilibrium velocity $V$ and lateral position $\varepsilon$ of various dispersed micro-objects such as beads, bubbles and drops, in a cylindrical microchannel over an unprecedent wide range of parameters. By systematically varying the dimensionless object size ($d \in [0.1; 1]$), the viscosity ratio ($λ\in [10^{-2}; \infty[$), the density ratio ($φ\in [10^{-3}; 2]$), the Reynolds number ($\Re …
Boiling crisis is a transition between nucleate and film boiling. In this communication we present a physical model of the boiling crisis based on the vapor recoil effect. Our numerical simulations of the thermally controlled bubble growth at high heat fluxes show how the bubble begins to spread over the heater thus forming a germ for the vapor film. The vapor recoil force not only causes the vapor spreading, it also creates a strong adhesion to the heater that prevents the bubble departure, thus favoring the further bubble spreading. Near the liquid-gas critical point, the bubble growth is ve…
Electrofuels (e-fuels) produced from renewable electricity and carbon sources have gained significant attention in recent years as promising alternatives to fossil fuels for the transportation sector. However, the highly volatile e-fuels, such as short-chain oxymethylene ethers are prone to flash vaporization phenomena, which is associated with the formation and growth of vapor bubbles, followed by explosive bursting of the liquid jet. The simulation of a flash boiling spray of such highly volatile liquid fuels in the context of automotive or cryogenic engines is numerically challenging due to…
The understanding of the shrinkage dynamics of plasmonic bubbles formed around metallic nanoparticles immersed in liquid and irradiated by a resonant light source is crucial for the usage of these bubbles in numerous applications. In this paper we experimentally show and theoretically explain that a plasmonic bubble during its shrinkage undergoes two different phases: first, a rapid partial bubble shrinkage governed by vapor condensation and, second, a slow diffusion-controlled bubble dissolution. The history of the bubble formation plays an important role in the shrinkage dynamics during the …
In this paper a diffuse-interface model featuring phase change, transition to supercritical conditions, thermal conduction, compressibility effects and shock wave propagation is exploited to deal with the dynamics of a cavitation bubble. At variance with previous descriptions, the model is uniformly valid for all phases (liquid, vapor and supercritical) and phase transitions involved, allowing to describe the non-equilibrium processes ongoing during the collapse. As consequence of this unitary description, rather unexpectedly for pure vapor bubbles, the numerical experiments show that the coll…
In this contribution we review recent efforts on investigations of the effect of (apparent) boundary slip by utilizing lattice Boltzmann simulations. We demonstrate the applicability of the method to treat fundamental questions in microfluidics by investigating fluid flow in hydrophobic and rough microchannels as well as over surfaces covered by nano- or microscale gas bubbles.
Inertial pumping is a promising new method of moving fluids through microchannels but many of its properties remain unexplored. In this work, inertial flow rates are investigated for different channel lengths, operating temperatures, and resistor pulse energies. Flow in closed channels is visualized by adding fluorescent tracer beads to the test fluid (pure water). A robust methodology of extracting flow rates from high-resolution video recordings is developed. Flow rates are found to scale inversely with the channel length. The observed dependence is explained based on a simple phenomenologic…
We report a 2D modeling of the thermal diffusion-controlled growth of a vapor bubble attached to a heating surface during saturated boiling. The heat conduction problem is solved in a liquid that surrounds a bubble with a free boundary and in a semi-infinite solid heater by the boundary element method. At high system pressure the bubble is assumed to grow slowly, its shape being defined by the surface tension and the vapor recoil force, a force coming from the liquid evaporating into the bubble. It is shown that at some typical time the dry spot under the bubble begins to grow rapidly under th…
We demonstrate and explain a simple and efficient way to remove gas bubbles from liquid-filled microchannels, by integrating a hydrophobic porous membrane on top of the microchannel. A prototype chip is manufactured in hard, transparent polymer with the ability to completely filter gas plugs out of a segmented flow at rates up to 7.4 microliter/s per mm2 of membrane area. The device involves a bubble generation section and a gas removal section. In the bubble generation section, a T-junction is used to generate a train of gas plugs into a water stream. These gas plugs are then transported towa…
We consider the collapse behavior of cavitation bubbles near walls under high ambient pressure conditions. Generic configurations with different stand-off distances are investigated by numerical simulation using a fully compressible two-phase flow solver including phase change. The results show that the stand-off distance has significant effects on collapse dynamics, micro-jet formation, rebound, and maximum wall pressure. A relation between cavitation induced material damage and corresponding collapse mechanisms is obtained from pressure-impact data at the wall. We analyze the resolution depe…
We numerically investigate the effect of non-condensable gas inside a vapor bubble on bubble dynamics, collapse pressure and pressure impact of spherical and aspherical bubble collapses. Free gas inside a vapor bubble has a damping effect that can weaken the pressure wave and enhance the bubble rebound. To estimate this effect numerically, we derive and validate a multi-component model for vapor bubbles containing gas. For the cavitating liquid and the non-condensable gas, we employ a homogeneous mixture model with a coupled equation of state for all components. The cavitation model for the ca…
A refined hydrochemical model for single-bubble sonoluminescence (SBSL) is presented. The processes of water vapor evaporation and condensation, mass diffusion, and chemical reactions are taken into account. Numerical simulations of Xe-, Ar- and He-filled bubbles are carried out. The results show that the trapped water vapor in conjunction with its endothermic chemical reactions significantly reduces the temperature within the bubble so that the degrees of ionization are generally very low. The chemical radicals generated from water vapor are shown to play an increasingly important role in the…
We explore air invasion in an initially water-filled dead-end compliant microchannel containing a constriction. The phenomenon is driven by the pervaporation of the liquid present in the channel through the surrounding medium. The penetration is intermittent, jerky, and characterised by a stop-and-go dynamics as the bubble escapes the constriction. We demonstrate that this sequence of arrest and jump of the bubble is due to an elastocapillary coupling between the air-liquid interface and the elastic medium. When the interface enters the constriction, its curvature strongly increases, leading t…
In this paper, a numerical study is conducted to investigate boiling of a cryogen on a solid surface as well as on a liquid surface. Both single mode and multi-mode boiling is reported for boiling on to a solid surface. In case of boiling on a liquid surface, liquid nitrogen is selected as the cryogen (boiling fluid) and water is chosen as the base fluid (heating fluid). Different flow instabilities and their underlying consequences during boiling of a cryogen are also discussed. For the boiling on a solid surface, in the single mode, bubble growth, its departure, and area weighted average hea…
This article presents a computational study of saturated flow boiling in non-circular microchannels. The unit channel of a multi-microchannel evaporator, consisting of the fluidic channel and surrounding evaporator walls, is emulated and the conjugate heat transfer problem is solved. Simulations are performed using OpenFOAM v2106 and the built-in geometric Volume Of Fluid method, augmented with self-developed libraries to include liquid-vapour phase-change and improve the surface tension force calculation. A systematic study is conducted by employing water at atmospheric pressure, a channel hy…
Boiling is a very efficient way to transfer heat from a heater to the liquid carrier. We discuss the boiling crisis, a transition between two regimes of boiling: nucleate and film boiling. The boiling crisis results in a sharp decrease in the heat transfer rate, which can cause a major accident in industrial heat exchangers. In this communication, we present a physical model of the boiling crisis based on the vapor recoil effect. Under the action of the vapor recoil the gas bubbles begin to spread over the heater thus forming a germ for the vapor film. The vapor recoil force not only causes it…
Laser triggered and photothermally induced vapor bubbles have emerged as promising approaches to facilitate optomechanical energy conversion for numerous relevant applications in micro/nanofluidics. Here we report the observation of a sub-megahertz spontaneous nucleation of explosive plasmonic bubbles, triggered by a continuous wave laser. The periodic nucleation is found to be a result of the competition of Kelvin impulsive forces and thermal Marangoni forces applied on residual bubbles after collapse. The former originates from asymmetric bubble collapse, resulting in the directed locomotion…
We create a highly controlled lab environment-accessible to both global and local monitoring-to analyse turbulent boiling flows and in particular their shear stress in a statistically stationary state. Namely, by precisely monitoring the drag of strongly turbulent Taylor-Couette flow (the flow in between two co-axially rotating cylinders, Reynolds number $\textrm{Re}\approx 10^6$) during its transition from non-boiling to boiling, we show that the intuitive expectation, namely that a few volume percent of vapor bubbles would correspondingly change the global drag by a few percent, is wrong. Ra…
We investigate the nature of vapor bubble nucleation near a nanoscale-curved convex liquid-solid interface using two models; an equilibrium Gibbs model for homogenous formation, and a nonequilibrium dynamic van der Waals/diffuse interface model for phase change in an initially cool liquid. Vapor bubble formation is shown to occur for sufficiently large radius of curvature and is suppressed for smaller radii. Solid-fluid interactions are accounted for and it is shown that liquid-vapor interfacial energy, hence Laplace pressure, has limited influence over bubble formation. The dominant factor is…
Water-immersed gold nanoparticles irradiated by a laser can trigger the nucleation of plasmonic bubbles after a delay time of a few microseconds [Wang et al., Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci. USA 122, 9253,(2018)]. Here we systematically investigated the light-vapor conversion efficiency, η, of these plasmonic bubbles as a function of the ambient pressure. The efficiency of the formation of these initial-phase and mainly water-vapor containing bubbles, which is defined as the ratio of the energy that is required to form the vapor bubbles and the total energy dumped in the gold nanoparticles before nucle…
Bubble-driven inertial pumps are a novel method of moving liquids through microchannels. We combine high-speed imaging, computational fluid dynamics (CFD) simulations and an effective one-dimensional model to study the fundamentals of inertial pumping. For the first time, single-pulse transient flow through U-shaped microchannels is imaged over the entire pump cycle with 4-microsecond temporal resolution. Observations confirm the fundamental N-shape flow profile predicted earlier by theory and simulations. Experimental flow rates are used to calibrate the CFD and one-dimensional models to extr…
When a horizontal resistive wire is heated up to the boiling point in a subcooled liquid bath, some vapor bubbles nucleate on its surface. Traditional nucleate boiling theory predicts that bubbles generated from active nucleate sites, grow up and depart from the heating surface due to buoyancy and inertia. However, we observed here a different behavior: the bubbles slide along the heated wire. In this situation, unexpected regimes are observed; from the simple sliding motion to bubble clustering. We noticed that bubbles could rapidly change their moving direction and may also interact. Finally…
The non-linear bubble dynamics equations in a compressible liquid have been modified considering the effects of compressibility of both the liquid and the gas at the bubble interface. A new bubble boundary equation has been derived, which includes a new term resulted from the liquid bulk viscosity effects. The influence of this term has been numerically investigated considering the effects of water vapor and chemical reactions on the bubble evolution. The results clearly indicate that the new term has an important damping role at the collapse, so that its consideration decreases the amplitude …
In the present study, a 1-dimensional model is proposed to estimate the pressure drop and heat transfer coefficient for flow boiling in a rectangular microchannel. The present work takes into account the pressure fluctuations caused due to the confined bubble growth and the effect of pressure fluctuations on the heat transfer characteristics. The heat transfer model considers five zones, namely, liquid slug, partially confined bubble, fully confined (elongated) bubble, partial dryout and full dry-out. The model incorporates the thinning of liquid film due to shear stress at liquid-vapour inter…
We present a parametric study of the unsteady phenomena associated with the flow of elongated gas bubbles travelling through liquid-filled square capillaries under high Weber number conditions. These conditions consistently induce the formation of a re-entrant jet at the back of the bubble that commonly gives way to a deep liquid cavity. Subsequent steps include pinch-off events in the cavity to generate one or multiple encapsulated drops which may coalesce, in conjunction with the bursting of the bubble-liquid interface by either the cavity or the drops. Some of these interfacial instabilitie…
Equations of radial motion of a gas bubble in a compressible viscous liquid have been modified to account for compressibility at the bubble boundary. A new bubble boundary equation has been derived, including a new term resulted from liquid compressibility. The influence of this term has been numerically investigated using isothermal-adiabatic model for the gas inside the bubble. The results clearly indicate that, at the end of the collapse, the new term has a very significant role and its consideration dramatically changes the bubble characteristics. Moreover, the more intense the collapse is…
We analyze the properties of naturally formed nano-bubbles in Lennard-Jones molecular dynamics simulations of liquid-to-vapor nucleation in the boiling and the cavitation regimes. The large computational volumes provide a realistic environment at unchanging average temperature and liquid pressure, which allows us to accurately measure properties of bubbles from their inception as stable, critically sized bubbles, to their continued growth into the constant speed regime. Bubble gas densities are up to 50$%$ lower than the equilibrium vapor densities at the liquid temperature, yet quite close to…
The collapse of a vapor bubble near a flat solid boundary results in the formation of a jet that is directed towards the boundary. In more complex geometries such as corners, predictions of the collapse cannot be made in a straightforward manner due to the loss of axial symmetry. We experimentally investigate the bubble collapse and jet formation in corners formed of two flat solid boundaries with different opening angles. Using potential flow analysis, we accurately predict the direction of the jet and bubble displacement. We further show that for a corner with an opening angle $α$, there exi…
A vapor bubble collapsing near a solid boundary in a liquid produces a liquid jet that points toward the boundary. The direction of this jet has been studied for boundaries such as flat planes and parallel walls enclosing a channel. Extending these investigations to enclosed polygonal boundaries, we experimentally measure jet direction for collapsing bubbles inside a square and an equilateral triangular channel. Following the method of Tagawa and Peters (Phys. Rev. Fluids 3, 081601, 2018) for predicting the jet direction in corners, we model the bubble as a sink in a potential flow and demonst…
Cavitation bubbles collapsing and rebounding in a pressure gradient grad(p) form a "micro-jet" enveloped by a "vapor jet". This letter presents unprecedented observations of the vapor jets formed in a uniform gravity-induced grad(p), modulated aboard parabolic flights. The data uncovers that the normalized jet volume is independent of the liquid density and viscosity and proportional to zeta=grad(p)*R0/p, where R0 is the maximal bubble radius and p is the driving pressure. A derivation inspired by "Kelvin-Blake" considerations confirms this law and reveals its negligible dependence of surface …
We report on recent progress in the physical and numerical modeling of compressible two-phase flows that involve phase transition between the liquid and gaseous state of the fluid. The high-speed dynamics of cavitation bubbles is studied in well-resolved simulations (DNS) with a sharp-interface numerical model on a micro scale. The underlying assumption of the employed evaporation/condensation model is that phase change occurs in thermal non-equilibrium and that the associated timescale is larger than that of the wave dynamics. Results for the collapse of a spherical vapor bubble close to a so…
