Boiling Heat Transfer Coefficient, Pressure Drop and Flow Pattern of a Two-Phase Flow in a Horizontal Mini Channel with R290

Many researchers have done various studies on the correlation development to predict the heat transfer coefficient and pressure drop. It is of great urgency to accurately predict the correlation to avoid a discrepancy when designing a heat exchanger. This study is aimed at determining the characteristics of a heat transfer coefficient and a pressure drop of refrigerant R290 by employing experimental data. Moreover, it is also aimed at making several comparisons in order to obtain the best correlations used to predict the experimental data. The experimental data are the two-phase flow boiling in a horizontal tube with the inner diameter of 3 mm, the mass flux of 50 kg/m2s to 180 kg/m2s, the heat flux of 5 kW/m2 to 20 kW/m2, the saturation temperature of 0oC to 11oC, and the vapor quality of up to 1. This study shows the effects of the two-phase Reynolds Number on the experimental heat transfer coefficient and the pressure drop. Aizuddin et al.,’s [1] heat transfer coefficient correlation and Sun and Mishima’s pressure drop correlation showed the best prediction, namely mean absolute deviation of 14.07% and 27.64%, respectively. Wojtan et al.,'s [2] flow pattern map showed better flow pattern prediction with the experimental data.