A unifying criterion of the boiling crisis

Limiao Zhang; Chi Wang; Guanyu Su; Artyom Kossolapov; Gustavo Matana Aguiar; Jee Hyun Seong; Florian Chavagnat; Bren Phillips; Md Mahamudur Rahman; Matteo Bucci

doi:10.1038/s41467-023-37899-7

A unifying criterion of the boiling crisis

Nat Commun. 2023 Apr 22;14(1):2321. doi: 10.1038/s41467-023-37899-7.

Authors

Limiao Zhang^{1

2}, Chi Wang^{1

3}, Guanyu Su^{1

4}, Artyom Kossolapov¹, Gustavo Matana Aguiar¹, Jee Hyun Seong^{1

5}, Florian Chavagnat¹, Bren Phillips¹, Md Mahamudur Rahman^{1

6}, Matteo Bucci⁷

Affiliations

¹ Department of Nuclear Science and Engineering, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge, MA, 02139, USA.
² Information Materials and Intelligent Sensing Laboratory of Anhui Province, Anhui University, Hefei, China.
³ Department of Mechanical Science and Engineering, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, Urbana, IL, 61801, USA.
⁴ Department of Nuclear Engineering, University of California, Berkeley, CA, 94709, USA.
⁵ Los Alamos National Laboratory, Los Alamos, NM, 87545, USA.
⁶ Department of Mechanical Engineering, University of Texas at El Paso, El Paso, TX, 79968, USA.
⁷ Department of Nuclear Science and Engineering, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge, MA, 02139, USA. mbucci@mit.edu.

Abstract

We reveal and justify, both theoretically and experimentally, the existence of a unifying criterion of the boiling crisis. This criterion emerges from an instability in the near-wall interactions of bubbles, which can be described as a percolation process driven by three fundamental boiling parameters: nucleation site density, average bubble footprint radius and product of average bubble growth time and detachment frequency. Our analysis suggests that the boiling crisis occurs on a well-defined critical surface in the multidimensional space of these parameters. Our experiments confirm the existence of this unifying criterion for a wide variety of boiling surface geometries and textures, two boiling regimes (pool and flow boiling) and two fluids (water and liquid nitrogen). This criterion constitutes a simple mechanistic rule to predict the boiling crisis, also providing a guiding principle for designing boiling surfaces that would maximize the nucleate boiling performance.

Abstract

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