Critical heat flux thermodynamics

Convective boiling in subcooled water flowing through a heated channel is essential in many engineering applications where high heat flux need to be accommodated, such as in the divertor plates of fusion reactors. There are many available correlations for predicting heat transfer in the individual regimes of the empirical Nukiyama boiling curve, although unfortunately there is no physical fundamentals of such curve. Recently, the author has shown that the classical entropy balance could contain key information about boiling heat transfer. So, it was found that the average thermal gap in the heated channel (the wall temperature minus the average temperature of the coolant fluid) was strongly correlated with the efficiency of a theoretical reversible engine placed in this thermal gap. In this work and from the new proposed correlation, a new expression of the wall temperature in function of the average fluid temperature is derived and successfully checked against experimental data from General Electric. This expression suggests a new and simple definition of the critical heat flux (CHF), a key parameter of the thermal-hydraulic design of fusion reactors. Finally, based on the new definition, the CHF trends are commented.