Enhancement and optimization of cryogenic metal tube chilldown heat transfer using thin-film coating, I. Effects of flow mass flux and coating layer thickness

This paper is the first of a two-part series that presents experimental data and analysis on the liquid nitrogen quenching heat transfer process of a stainless-steel tube with an inner surface low-thermal conductivity thin-film coating. The experimental data covers a wide range of flow mass fluxes (43 to 1077 kg/m2s). The experiments were conducted using test tubes with four different coating thicknesses to investigate the effects of various Teflon coating thicknesses. An analysis of the chilldown time and LN2 mass consumption data are presented to evaluate the effects of the flow mass flux, axial distance from the tube inlet, and coating layer thickness. The chilldown time decreases with increasing flow Re. However, the chilldown mass consumption increases with increasing flow Re. In general, the larger the flow Reynolds number, the lower the percentage reduction in chilldown time is observed. For the percentage reduction in the chilldown time by the coating, the minimum is 27.8% for the tube with 7-layer coating at flow of Re = 100,000 and the maximum is 61.3% for the tube with 14-layer coating at flow of Re = 10,000. The percentage reduction in mass consumption due to coating falls in the range between 35.3% and 54.1%.