Rewet Temperature Correlations for Liquid Nitrogen Boiling Pipe Flows Across Varying Flow Conditions and Orientations

Abstract

In many convective liquid–vapor phase-change heat transfer engineering applications, cryogenic fluids are widely used in industrial processes, spacecraft and cryosurgery systems, and so on. For example, cryogens are usually used as liquid fuels such as liquid hydrogen, liquid methane, and liquid oxygen in the rocket industry, liquid nitrogen and helium are frequently used to cool superconducting magnetic device for medical applications. In these systems, proper transport, handling, and storage of cryogenic fluids are of extreme importance. Among all the cryogenic transport processes performed in room temperatures, quenching, also termed chilldown, is an unavoidable initial, transient phase-change heat transfer process that brings the system down to the cryogenic condition. The Leidenfrost temperature or rewet temperature that signals the end of film boiling is practically considered the completion point of a quenching process. Therefore, rewet temperature has been considered the most important parameter for the engineering design of cryogenic thermal management systems. As most of the previous correlations for predicting the Leidenfrost temperature and the rewet temperature have been developed for water, they are shown to disagree with recent liquid nitrogen pipe chilldown experiments in upward and downward flow directions over a wide range of flow rates, pressures, and degrees of inlet subcooling. In addition to a complete review of the literature, two modified correlations are presented, one based on bubble growth and another based on the theoretical maximum limit of superheat. Each correlation performs well over the entire dataset.