Technology advancements entail a necessity to remove huge amounts of heat produced by today’s electronic devices based on highly integrated circuits, major generators of heat. Heat transfer to boiling liquid flowing through narrow minichannels is a modern solution to the problem of heat transfer enhancement. The study was conducted for FC-72 boiling in a rectangular, vertical and asymmetrically heated minichannel that had depths of 0.5-1.5 mm, a width of 20 mm and a length of 360 mm. The heat flux increased and decreased within the range of 58.3-132.0 kWm⁻², the absolute pressure ranged from 0.116 to 0.184 MPa and the mass flux was 185-1139.2 kgm⁻²s⁻¹. The boiling process took place on a flat vertical heating surface made of Haynes-230 0.1 mm thick acid-proof rolled plate with the surface roughness of 121 μm.

In this paper, attempts were made to experimentally investigate the boiling incipience in a narrow rectangular vertical channel of 1 mm depth with an external 40 mm wide wall heated uniformly and others assumed quasiadiabatic. The “boiling front” location was determined from the temperature distribution of the heated wall obtained from liquid crystal thermography. Boiling incipience occurs when a considerable rise in the wall temperature above the saturation temperature takes place. Thus, boiling incipience is accompanied by “nucleation hysteresis.” The impact of various factors on the boiling incipience in microchannels, such as pressure, the inlet liquid subcooling, and flow velocity, were investigated.