Effect of surface thickness on the wetting front velocity during jet impingement surface cooling

A hot stainless steel (SS-304) surface of 450 +/- 10 A degrees C initial temperature is cooled with a normally impinging round water jet. The experiments have been performed for the surface of different thickness e.g. 1, 2, 3 mm and jet Reynolds number in the range of Re = 26,500-48,000. The cooling performance of the hot test surface is evaluated on the basis of wetting front velocity. The wetting front velocity is determined for 10-40 mm downstream spatial locations away from the stagnation point. It has been observed that the wetting front velocity increase with the rise in jet flow rate, however, diminishes towards the downstream spatial location and with the rise in surface thickness. The proposed correlation for the dimensionless wetting front velocity predicts the experimental data well within the error band of +/- 30 %, whereas, 75 % of experimental data lies within the range of +/- 20 %.