Rewetting of an infinite tube with internal heating

Abstract

A numerical study has been made to investigate the effect of internal heating and precursory cooling during quenching of an infinite tube. The finite difference solution gives the quench front temperature as a function of various model parameters such as Peclet number, Biot number and dimensionless heat flux. The parametric dependence of the rewetting rate is obtained by the condition that the surface can only be wetted when its temperature is below the quench front temperature. Also, the critical heat flux is obtained by setting Peclet number equal to zero, which gives the minimum heat flux required to prevent the hot surface being rewetted. The numerical model is validated by comparing the results with known closed form solutions.