Numerical simulation of flow boiling heat transfer characteristics of R134a/Ethane binary mixture in horizontal micro-tube

The cryogenic organic Rankine cycle (ORC) is appropriate for recovering the cold energy of liquefied natural gas (LNG) for power generation. However, pure working fluids in ORC are challenging to match the evaporation curve of LNG appropriately, which causes a large amount of exergy loss. Thus, adopting mixture working fluid is a good option due to their temperature-varying evaporation and condensation process. This study investigates the heat transfer characteristic of R134a/ethane (widely adopted in cryogenic ORC as pure working fluid) binary mixture in the horizontal micro-tube through numerical simulation. The law of boiling heat transfer characteristics with vapor quality, heat flux, mass flow, ethane mole fraction, and other factors are obtained. The simulation illustrated that the boiling heat transfer coefficient increases with the heat flux and mass flow. Furthermore, compared with R134a, ethane has higher thermal conductivity, lower vapor density, and latent heat of vaporization. Hence, the heat transfer coefficient of the R134a/ethane mixture increases with the ethane’s mole fraction. The fluid disturbance mainly influences the pressure drop and the turbulence intensity significantly when the fluid is transformed into a gas–liquid flow. This study could provide insights into boiling heat transfer improvement of binary mixtures for ORC power generation applications.