Equipment Performance: Consider

Critical Heat Flux

Oct. 19, 2022

Avoid surprises when altering heat-exchanger operating conditions

Andrew Sloley

Nukiyama Curve
Figure 1. Reaching critical heat flux can have grave consequences.

My client had just changed the heat source for a heat integration exchanger. The intent was to get
more duty into the cold side of the exchanger by raising the temperature on the hot side. The
switch to hotter oil had increased the log mean temperature difference of the exchanger by
roughly 2.5 times. The 150% boost in duty would add capacity on the cold side of the heat
integration. However, after the change, the total exchanger duty only went up by a maximum of
about 10% instead of the 150% expected. As a consequence, a major expansion project had
failed.

Having seen a similar problem before, my first question was about the cold side of the exchanger.
“Was it a vaporizing service?” Indeed, it was. The next question was whether anyone had
checked for critical heat flux limits on the vaporization. After a short silence, the response was
“What’s critical heat flux?”

To understand what’s happening, we must go back to the 1930s. Shiro Nukiyama, a professor at
Tohoku-Imperial University in Japan, was working on increasing the rate of vaporization and
reducing the size of steam boilers. One limiting factor was called boiler burnout. During boiler
heat-up, if the tubes got too hot, they would jump from a stable operating point generating steam
to another operating point where the tubes would melt. Figure 1, which plots heat flux (duty/area)
versus surface temperature superheat (temperature of the metal above the boiling point of the
water), shows this jump. As a tube heated up, heat transfer rates increased along the curve to
Point A. At Point A, the tube temperature suddenly would jump to Point B. (Often, the type of
heat flux behavior depicted in Figure 1 is called a Nukiyama curve.) Unfortunately, for most
boilers Point B exceeds the melting temperature of the tube metal.

This problem had been known for a long time; parts of it were understood as early as the 1850s.
However, Nukiyama was the first person to work out a full quantitative analysis. (While partial
translations and abstracts were available, his full work was not translated into English until
1966.) He proposed that, at a certain critical heat flux (CHF) present at Point A, the vapor
generated on the tube surface pushed liquid away from the tube so the tube surface no longer was
fully wet. Figure 2 shows a general view of vapor pockets that occur at the CHF isolating part of
the metal surface from liquid contact.

As the tube metal continues to heat up, the problem gets worse. Heat transfer drops even though
temperature differences rise. At some point (the lowest heat flux between Point A and Point B
shown in Figure 1), radiation heat transfer becomes significant and heat transfer starts to increase
again. However, the operating region between Point A and Point B is not stable when heating up
the boiler tube. Transition from Point A to Point B can occur exceptionally fast.

Transition Boiling
Figure 2. Vapor pockets keep liquid from fully wetting the tube surface.

Independent work in the United States in the late 1940s showed that the same problem can afflict
heat exchangers. If the temperature difference becomes too high, a vapor blanket forms on the
surface of the exchanger tube and reduces heat transfer.

Predicting the CHF is an extremely complex problem. CHF values vary with physical properties
of the fluid, operating conditions, flow conditions and geometry, surface characteristics, and
other factors. Estimating the value is well beyond what we can discuss here. However, for most
systems, CHF will lie below a 200°F surface temperature superheat. In fact, in some conditions,
it may be as low as 72°F for boiling water.

The plant had moved from an average surface superheat temperature of just 150°F to nearly
400°F. The original exchanger configuration could suffer from vapor blanketing under some
conditions. The new heat source only made the problem worse. Fortunately, the surface superheat
temperature had not gone all the way up to Point B on the Nukiyama curve. The maximum
temperature of the heat source wasn’t that hot. So, the large increase in hot temperature only
achieved a small amount of extra duty.

Whenever you expect to run equipment far from current conditions, always check to make sure
new factors in operation won’t prevent the desired performance. Extreme extrapolation often
leads to many surprises.

About the Author

Andrew Sloley | Contributing Editor