Investigation of bubble departure diameter in horizontal and vertical subcooled flow boiling

•The force balance approach and correlation approach are conducted to predict bubble departure diameter.•A new semi-empirical correlation for bubble departure diameter is proposed in this paper.•The effects of dimensionless parameters on bubble departure diameters are analyzed. According to the force balance analysis on a bubble, the bubble departure diameter in horizontal subcooled flow boiling is mainly influenced by quasi-steady drag force, surface tension force and bubble growth force while an additional force, buoyancy force, plays an important role in vertical flow boiling. In this paper, the effects of these forces can be concluded by a series of dimensionless parameters including density ratio of vapor and liquid, Prandtl number, Jacob number and bubble Reynolds number. Based on the different forces, two different characteristic lengths are adopted to non-dimensionlize bubble departure diameters in horizontal flow boiling and vertical flow boiling, respectively. Finally, the semi-empirical correlations for bubble departure diameters in both horizontal and vertical subcooled flow boiling are proposed in this paper based on the force balance analysis and available experimental data from literature. The predicted results using the present correlations agree fairly well with the experimentally measured values with a mean relative error of 19.72%.