The Thickness of the Liquid Microlayer Between a Cap-Shaped Sliding Bubble and a Heated Wall: Experimental Measurements

A laser-based method has been developed to measure the thickness of the liquid microlayer between a cap-shaped sliding bubble and an inclined heated wall. Sliding vapor bubbles are known to create high heat transfer coefficients along the surfaces against which they slide. The details of this process remain unclear and depend on the evolution of the microlayer that forms between the bubble and the surface. Past experiments have used heat transfer measurements on uniform-heat-generation surfaces to infer the microlayer thickness through an energy balance. These studies have produced measurements of 20–100 μm for refrigerants and for water, but they have yet to be confirmed by a direct measurement that does not depend on a first-law closure. The results presented here are direct measurements of the microlayer thickness made from a reflectance-based fiber-optic laser probe. Details of the construction and calibration of the probe are presented. Data for saturated FC-87 and a uniform-temperature surface inclined at 2 deg to 15 deg from the horizontal are reported. Millimeter-sized spherical bubbles of FC-87 vapor were injected near the lower end of a uniformly heated aluminum plate. The laser probe yielded microlayer thicknesses of 22–55 μm for cap-shaped bubbles. Bubble Reynolds numbers range from 600 to 4800, Froude numbers from 0.9 to 1.7, and Weber numbers from 2.6 to 47. The microlayer thickness above cap-shaped bubbles was correlated to a function of inclination angle and a bubble shape factor. The successful correlation suggests that this data set can be used to validate the results of detailed models of the microlayer dynamics.