A critical review on measures to suppress flow boiling instabilities in microchannels

Due to the development of the electronic components, concentrator photovoltaic, fuel cell, etc., the cooling requirement of the devices increases rapidly. Due to the higher heat transfer and compact design of the microchannel technology, it has been widely considered and investigated to solve the increasing heat flux. Boiling heat transfer is an effective way to dissipate a mass of heat using the latent heat of phase change. Hence, comparing with the single phase liquid flow, flow boiling in microchannel utilizes both advantages of micro scale effect and phase change effect, and can realize a much higher heat flux. Therefore, it becomes a critical way for super high heat dissipation. However, the procedure of the phase change and two phase flow may lead to instability, which can seriously inhibit the heat transfer performance of coolant in microchannel. To tackle with the flow boiling instability, a number of methods were proposed and reported. Therefore, in this paper, to effectively improve the flow boiling in microchannel heat exchanger, the cutting-edge control technologies in this field were reviewed, categorized and summarized, and the future trend of the research was presented.