A New Paradigm for Understanding and Enhancing the Critical Heat Flux (CHF) Limit

Nearly a century of research on enhancing critical heat flux (CHF) has focused on altering the boiling surface properties such as its nucleation site density, wettability, wickability and heat transfer area. But, a mechanism to manipulate dynamics of the vapor and liquid interactions above the boiling surface as a means of enhancing CHF has not been proposed. Here, a new approach is implemented to limit the vapor phase lateral expansion over the heat transfer surface and actively control the surface wetted area fraction, known to decline monotonically with increasing heat flux. This new degree of freedom has enabled reaching unprecedented CHF levels and revealed new details about the physics of CHF. The impact of wickability, effective heat transfer area, and liquid pressure on CHF is precisely quantified. Test results show that, when rewetting is facilitated, the CHF increases linearly with the effective surface heat transfer area. A maximum CHF of 1.8 kW/cm² was achieved on a copper structure with the highest surface area among all tested surfaces. A model developed based on the experimental data suggests that the thermal conductivity of the surface structures ultimately limits the CHF; and a maximum CHF of 7-8 kW/cm² may be achieved using diamond surface structures.