Boiling is ubiquitous, from cooking food to industrial processes. Boiling is also an efficient way to enhance heat transfer and, therefore, it is used in a wide range of applications, from cooling electronic devices to refrigeration systems, to heat exchangers in industrial processes.
Understanding boiling processes is essential for optimising heat transfer and energy efficiency. In most applications involving boiling heat exchanges the flow is forced considerably complicating the phenomenology.
In this project the team aims at advancing the current level of understanding of the fundamental physics processes involved in forced boiling convection with possibly a relevant impact on the efficiency and energy consumption of a vast number of industrial processes.
The challenge in studying boiling is the vastly multiscale nature of the problem that requires not only to accurately resolve the wide range of turbulent length scales, but also the interface and structure on individual vapours bubbles from when they nucleate to when they reach their maximal size.
For this reason, fully resolved studies of boiling processes became possible only recently and call out massive computational resources.
Eindhoven University of Technology, Netherlands
ETH Zürich, Switzerland
The Abdus Salam International Centre for Theoretical Physics (ICTP), Italy