Evaluation and Research on Correlation for Spray Cooling

Abstract Spray cooling is influenced by many related parameters, making analysis of heat transfer mechanisms and prediction of cooling performance challenging. After summarizing and analyzing fifteen different forms of correlation in spray cooling literature, it appears that there are four expressions for spray cooling correlation. 2989 experimental data under different experimental conditions in twelve studies were collected to form an experimental database to evaluate the prediction of correlations. The prediction accuracy of Nusselt number correlations based on droplet diameter is considered the best, while that of correlations based on dimensionless heat flux is considered the worst. The factor analysis method was used to analyze the prediction differences of correlations and investigate the correlation between parameters and the heat transfer process. We found that the correlation with the best evaluation accuracy must contain more parameters with high correlation. A new correlation was derived based on this conclusion to predict the data better.