Only a wet tube is a good tube: understanding capillary-assisted thin-film evaporation of water for adsorption chillers

Efficient evaporation of water at low temperatures is challenging due to its low saturation pressure. As a consequence, the preferred evaporation by nucleate boiling can only be achieved at the cost of high superheats. However, low superheats can still lead to efficient evaporation by thin-film evaporation. In this work, we experimentally characterize the heat transfer for thin-film evaporation on coated copper tubes, which use capillary action to create a thin film on their surface. The overall heat transfer through the tubes is determined at all filling levels for evaporator inlet temperatures of 10, 15 and 20 °C with varied driving force. Our experiments reveal that poor coatings suffer from dry-out at high driving forces whereas tubes with good coatings remain fully wetted even at high driving force. Furthermore, we show the impact of surface properties on thin-film evaporation: high porosity, surface extension and roughness promote the creation of a thin film on the tube. Thereby, the heat transfer UA-value is increased up to a factor of 10