[Conference Paper] Global sensitivity analysis of a pure steam dropwise condensation heat transfer model

Jakob Sablowski, Simon Unz and Michael Beckmann. 2021. Journal of Physics: Conference Series. DOI: 10.1088/1742-6596/2116/1/012012

Presentation given at the 8th European Thermal Sciences Conference (EUROTHERM 2021) 20-22 September 2021. The conference paper is related to this preprint, which is a little bit more comprehensive.

Abstract

Established heat transfer models for dropwise condensation (DWC) consider wetting behavior, surface structure and nucleation dynamics to calculate the heat flux. However, model results often deviate from experiments, in part due to uncertainties of the model input parameters. In this study, we apply quantitative sensitivity analysis to a pure steam DWC heat transfer model in order to attribute the variation of the model result to its input parameters. Four scenarios with different variations of the model parameters are discussed and sensitivity coefficients for each parameter are calculated. Our results show a high sensitivity of the model result towards the coating thickness, the contact angle and the nucleation site density, underlining the need to accurately determine these parameters in DWC experiments.