FEATURES OF THE DYNAMICS OF DEVELOPMENT
AND THE THERMAL STABILITY OF DRY SPOTS
IN FLOWING-DOWN LIQUID FILMS

I. P. Starodubtseva and A. N. Pavlenko

UDC 536.248

A numerical experiment for description of the critical 
phenomena in the case of intense heat exchange in flowing-down wave 
films of a cryogenic liquid on heat-releasing surfaces bounded in 
length has been carried out. Numerical modeling of the thermal stability 
of dry spots with heat-transfer conditions determined experimentally 
yields a satisfactory agreement with the values of the critical heat-flux 
density obtained in the experiments. This confirms the hypothesis 
that, in certain regimes of film flow, the development of a crisis 
is related to the upstream propagation of a temperature disturbance, 
when the threshold of thermal stability of the dry spots is attained. 
The value of the critical heat flux is much lower than that calculated 
from the existing hydrodynamic models.

S. S. Kutateladze Institute of Thermal Physics, Siberian 
Branch of the Russian Academy of Sciences, 1 Lavrent'ev Ave., Novosibirsk, 
630090, Russia; email: irstar@mail.ru. Translated from Inzhenerno-Fizicheskii 
Zhurnal, Vol. 80, No. 6, pp. 138-144, November-December, 2007. 
Original article submitted April 4, 2006.