A review of numerical investigation on pool boiling

HT Jiang and YW Liu and HQ Chu, JOURNAL OF THERMAL ANALYSIS AND CALORIMETRY, 148, 8697-8745 (2023).

DOI: 10.1007/s10973-023-12292-0

The rapid development of industrial technology and the increasing computational power have provided the possibility to improve the accuracy of multiphase flow field simulation studies. In addition, the chaotic nature of boiling phenomena increases the difficulty of experimental studies, and there is an urgent need to improve the computational methods to meet the needs of industrial applications. This paper presents a comprehensive review of the published literatures on the study of pool boiling using computational methods in the last two decades, including macroscopic-scale computational methods based on continuous medium theory, mesoscopic-scale methods based on lattice Boltzmann method (LBM), and nanoscale molecular dynamics. The advantages and disadvantages of different approaches to study bubble dynamics, including nucleation mechanisms, bubble growth, bubble detachment, and nucleation sites density, are evaluated based on different modeling features and phase change mechanisms. After considering micro-layer evaporation, wall convection, and transient conduction in the macroscopic scale model, the shape diffraction of isolated bubbles and departure diameters obtained by the macroscopic approach agree well with experimental data, and the Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute model achieves promising results for the simulation of low concentration nanofluids as well. The coupling of Shan-Chen model (S-C model) and Peng-Robinson (P-R) equation of state and considering the thermal lattice Boltzmann approach can effectively solve the phase separation problem, and the simulation results can match the theoretical analysis with the highest accuracy. In addition to the above results, a complete boiling heat transfer curve was successfully simulated for the first time using the LBM method. Molecular dynamics provides an in-depth mechanistic explanation of nucleation of nanobubbles in microstructures and on different wettability surfaces in terms of free energy and pressure fluctuations. Although different methods have achieved different degrees of success in pool boiling simulations, problems of boundary capture and heat and mass transfer near macroscopic methods, mesh accuracy in mesoscopic methods, treatment of density ratios and error terms, and accuracy of gas-liquid interfaces in molecular dynamics methods still limit the development of numerical computation. Therefore, this review also presents the challenges and future directions of simulation methods for modeling at different scales from the authors' perspective. Multi-scale coupling methods will be highlighted as an important goal to accommodate the development of advanced pool boiling simulations.

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