The effect of surface roughness on nucleate boiling heat transfer is not clearly understood.This study is devised to conduct detailed heat transfer and bubble measurements during boiling on a heater surface with controlled roughness. This second of two companion papers presents an analysis of heat transfer and bubble ebullition in nucleate boiling with new measures of surface roughness: area ratio, surface mean normal angle, and maximum idealized surface on the boiling curves and bubble behaviors suggests that the relative "roughness" of a surface should be quantified in a manner different from existing approaches to date in the literature.Several recent studies have reported attempts to develop surface characterization methods that relate more directly to boiling physics. Qi et al.[2] applied a digital "filtering" operation on 2-D surface scan data to examine potential nucleation sites in terms of cavity mouth radius and cone angle. They did not elaborate on the details of the algorithm; predictions of nucleation site density based on their analysis produced mixed results.
ANALYSIS OF SURFACE ROUGHNESSIn the companion paper to this work [1], six borosilicate glass substrates were roughened by abrading with diamond compound to impart microscopic-scale roughness features, then annealed to control roughness characteristics at the nanoscale. One substrate (test piece 1) was not abraded or annealed. All seven substrates were coated conformally with an electrically conductive ITO layer, from which a 400 µm wide × 25 mm long heater/sensor device was patterned on each substrate. Each test piece was fixed at the base of a thermally controlled chamber that allowed saturated nucleate boiling heat transfer to be measured while recording 5 high-speed videographic visualizations from beneath the test surface and from the side simultaneously.Test pieces 4, 6, and 7 were abraded with the same diamond compound such that R a values (and therefore microscopic-scale roughness features) would be similar. These three surfaces, however, were exposed to different annealing conditions of temperature and soak period as shown in Table 1 [1] such that the roughness characteristics at the nanoscale are very different.Boiling performance for the three surfaces differed as described in and is valid for contact angles up to roughly 150°. The Fritz departure diameter meets the criteria above, including fluid properties and wetting characteristic.
Filtered vertical roughness parametersAfter the filtering operation, new values of R a for the test substrates were calculated by the method described in [1], and are listed in Table 2. For each surface, there was little to no difference between the values calculated for different interrogation window sizes; the lowest values are reported here. After the filtering operation, the average roughness values of surfaces 6 and 7 (abraded with 100-µm particles and annealed more aggressively) fell below that of surface 3 (abraded with 30-µm particles). Indeed, surface 7 appears to be similar in roug...