Effects of Material on the Heat Transfer of R410A During Condensation and Evaporation

Abstract An Experimental investigation was conducted to demonstrate the effect of material on the heat transfer characteristics of R410A during evaporation inside two horizontal plain tubes with the same inner diameter of 6mm, and they are made of aluminum and stainless, respectively. The variation of vapor quality for test section were kept at 0.2–0.9, and mass velocities varied from 100 kg m−2s−1 to 400 kg m−2s−1. A series of single-phase and repetitive experiments was conducted to verify the accuracy and reliability of the test rig firstly. Various flow patterns including stratified, slug, and annular flow even dry-out may exist during the flow boiling experiments, while both ΔT-dependent and ΔT-independent flow are included for the test conditions of condensation. The results for evaporation have shown that the plain aluminum tube performs the best for all tested mass velocities. Several different correlations were employed to predict the present data and their predictive ability were compared. The results indicate that the Liu and Winterton can predict all the data points in an acceptable error band, and the slightly worse thermal performance of the stainless-steel tube may be attributed to the relatively low thermal conductivity. For condensation, little difference was found between two tested tubes, which means that the material and roughness may have little effect on the heat transfer performance during condensation.