Influences of Brass Surface Morphology on Leidenfrost Effect during Liquid Nitrogen Cooling

Abstract

Cooling in liquid nitrogen is a typical service condition of high-temperature superconducting wire, and the variation of boiling stages on the wire protective layers such as the brass layers could be crucial for the quench behavior of superconducting devices. In this study, the influence of brass surface morphology (parameters of surface roughness and fractal dimension) on the Leidenfrost effect (including the wall superheat at critical heat flux and the wall superheat at Leidenfrost point, which are respectively characterized by the temperatures of ΔTCHF and ΔTLP) was studied. The surfaces of brass samples were polished by sandpaper to obtain different morphologies, which were characterized by using white light interferometer images, and the boiling curves were recorded and analyzed by Matlab with lumped parameter method. The experimental results demonstrated that the surface morphology of brass samples could influence the ΔTLP significantly, but had no clear relationship with the ΔTCHF. Moreover, the multi-scaled analysis was carried out to explore the influencing mechanism of surface microstructure, the relationship between ΔTLP and scale was more clear when the scale was small, and the fractal dimension was calculated and discussed together with surface roughness. The findings of this study could be instructive for surface treatment of superconducting wires to suppress quench propagation.

Keywords

• Leidenfrost effect
• liquid nitrogen
• surface morphology
• roughness
• fractal dimension