Establishment of an experimental design in the context of water vaporization occurring on a plate cross section.

Compact evaporator like plate heat exchangers can play a significant role in reducing the investment cost of low cooling power sorption systems. If water is used as refrigerant, their design remain manly empirical. There is thus a need of better characterization of the influence of the driving parameters in order to optimize the evaporator design. An experimental design approach was chosen to understand the influence and the importance of each factor on evaporator performance. The test bench developed for this purpose allows to study flow regime inside the channel from a macroscopic point of view by means of a high speed camera. Three different boiling regimes were observed; however, significant cooling capacities (up to 500 W) were obtained when heat is transferred by evaporation induced by the spread of liquid by a bubble. Optimal liquid heights for interesting point were predicted from 1/5 to 1/3 of the plate.