A look-up table for fully developed film-boiling heat transfer

An improved look-up table for film-boiling heat-transfer coefficients has been derived for steam-water flow inside vertical tubes. Compared to earlier versions of the look-up table, the following improvements were made: The database has been expanded significantly. The present database contains 77,234 film-boiling data points obtained from 36 sources. The upper limit of the thermodynamic quality range was increased from 1.2 to 2.0. The wider range was needed as non-equilibrium effects at low flows can extend well beyond the point where the thermodynamic quality equals unity. The surface heat flux has been replaced by the surface temperature as an independent parameter. The new look-up table is based only on fully developed film-boiling data. The table entries at flow conditions for which no data are available is based on the best of five different film-boiling prediction methods. The new film-boiling look-up table predicts the database for fully developed film-boiling data with an overall rms error in heat-transfer coefficient of 10.56% and an average error of 1.71%. A comparison of the prediction accuracy of the look-up table with other leading film-boiling prediction methods shows that the look-up table results in a significant improvement in prediction accuracy. (C) 2003 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.