BOILING EXPERIMENTS UNDER MICROGRAVITY CONDITIONS BY USING TRANSPARENT HEATERS

The present paper shows the survey of the studies by the author for three different boiling systems in microgravity, flow boiling, pool boiling and narrow gap phenomena. In flow boiling studies, the effects of gravity on the liquid-vapor behaviors and on the heat transfer are clarified by both the experiments and analysis in the annular flow regime. In pool boiling experiments, information about the bubble structure, the possibility of steady state nucleate boiling in microgravity, the difference in heat transfer characteristics from those on ground, and the predicting method of surface heat flux are presented. Flow boiling in a narrow gap shows some unique trends indicating the possibility of the avoidance of serious heat transfer deterioration even for small gap sizes.