Boiling Heat Transfer on Wire-Mesh-Wrapped Extended Tube Surfaces

This article discusses one of the most promising techniques for enhancing boiling heat transfer by wrapping a wire mesh around a plane surface. Experimental investigations have been carried out to study boiling heat transfer for a plain stainless steel tube and stainless steel tubes wrapped with different sizes of stainless steel wire mesh, for saturated distilled water at atmospheric pressure in cross-flow configurations. The mass flux was varied from 0 to 8.27 kg/(m^2 s), and the tubes were heated resistively with a heat flux ranging from 12 to 55 kW/m2. The results show that the tubes wrapped with wire mesh provide better performance than the plain tube at low heat flux (up to 30 kW/m^2), whereas at high heat flux, the order of their performance reverses. The increase in boiling heat transfer is due to the enhanced retention time of the bubbles over tube surface and the increase in turbulence created around the tube surface as a result of the wire-mesh wrapping. The effects of input parameters such as the heat flux and mass flux on the boiling heat transfer coefficient for plain and wire-mesh-wrapped tube surfaces were also investigated in the present work.