CFD simulation of convective flow boiling of refrigerant in a vertical annulus

In this paper a forced convective boiling of Refrigerant R-113 in a vertical annular channel has been simulated by a custom version of the CFX-5 code. The employed subcooled boiling model uses a special treatment of the wall boiling boundary, which assures the grid invariant solution. The simulation results have been validated against the published experimental data. In general a good agreement with the experimental data has been achieved, which shows that the current model may be applied for the Refrigerant R-113 without significantly changing the model parameters. The influence of non-drag forces, bubble diameter size and interfacial drag model on the numerical results has been investigated as well.