Determination of Heat Transfer Coefficient in Pool Boiling of Organic Liquids Using Fuzzy Modeling Approach

Abstract

An adaptive fuzzy model to determine pool boiling heat transfer coefficients of saturated organic liquids on plain heating tube surface is presented in this article. For this, an experimental investigation for saturated pool boiling of alcohols (methanol and isopropanol) is carried out over a wide range of pressures on a copper heating tube surface. With the availability of measured/computed input–output data of alcohols corresponding to the variables of heat flux and heat transfer coefficient, respectively, fuzzy concepts are used to develop an adaptive fuzzy model. This model is able to identify the heat transfer coefficient of alcohols under wide range of pressure conditions with a considerable error variation of ± 0.5%. The competitive identification performances of the adaptive zero-order fuzzy model having two and six membership functions are compared with the MATLAB-based ANFIS toolbox. Use of the fuzzy modeling approach has resulted in closer approximation to the experimental data as compared to empirical correlation data. The modeling generalization performance is verified on known data samples corresponding to different surface–fluid combinations.