Low Frequency Pulsating Jet Impingement Boiling and Single Phase Heat Transfer

•Steady and pulsating single phase and boiling jet impingement is studied experimentally.•Surface temperature oscillations are not monotonic with Reynolds number.•Periodic renewal of the boiling process in-phase with jet pulsations is observed.•Temperature oscillations decrease with Strouhal number with an exponent of 0.63-0.75.•Vigorous ebullition during fully developed boiling suppresses temperature oscillations.•Pulsations have no discernible effect on time-averaged heat transfer performance. Experiments are carried out to characterize the influence of jet pulsations on the single phase and boiling heat transfer under a confined and submerged impinging jet, using water and FC-72. A novel jet pulsation mechanism is developed for introducing the mean flow pulsations at different jet flow rates. The effects of jet Reynolds number, pulsation frequency and amplitude are studied by comparison of the time-averaged Nusselt numbers and boiling curves against steady state data. The root-mean-squared dimensionless temperature oscillations in the heater are correlated to the jet Strouhal number, mean Reynolds number and the diffusion Fourier number of the heater that is based on the frequency of jet oscillations. Under both boiling and single phase cooling conditions, temperature oscillations are found to be inversely related to the Strouhal number with an exponent in the range 0.63-0.75. During pulsating jet impingement boiling, a periodic renewal of the boiling process is observed, where the bubbles on the heater surface are cyclically flushed downstream of the stagnation point in-phase with the pulsating flow. For the cases considered, the root-mean-squared dimensionless temperature is found to be negligible during fully developed nucleate boiling, indicating that the heat transfer process is pseudo-stationary. Here, vigorous ebullition is the dominant mechanism of heat transfer and suppresses any temperature oscillations that can arise due to the flow oscillations. For heat fluxes in the partial nucleate boiling regime and close to critical heat flux however, temperature oscillations decrease with an increase in jet Strouhal number. No marked influence of low frequency jet pulsations is found on the time averaged single phase or boiling heat transfer characteristics (including critical heat flux) for the range of parameters studied.