Experimental study on spray cooling under reduced pressures

Spay cooling is a complicated flow and heat transfer process affected by multi-factors among which the environmental pressure is extremely important. However the influence of pressure is not investigated sufficiently, especially the reduced pressure. In the present study, spray cooling under low initial environmental partial pressures and vapor partial pressures with R21 are investigated with a closed spray and condensation system. To study the influence of initial environmental partial pressure, different amounts of nitrogen are inflated into the vacuum flash chamber, while the vapor partial pressure is kept constant. To study the influence of vapor partial pressure, a cascade refrigerator is used to condense the vapor with different condensation temperatures so that the vapor partial pressure can be maintained or adjusted, while the initial environmental partial pressure is kept constant. The experimental results show that the spray cooling power increases monotonically with the increasing spray flow rate in the experimental range, while the cooling efficiency decreases with the increasing spray flow rate. The spray cooling power and cooling efficiency vary with the initial environmental partial pressure or the vapor partial pressure non-monotonously, which indicates there is an optimal pressure for the heat transfer performance. Besides, the mechanism of the non-monotonous variation trend is discussed based on the key aspects including flash evaporation, convection and boiling. Especially, the boiling heat transfer curve is applied to explain the trend.