LAUSR

Many correlations to estimate the heat transfer coefficient (HTC) in nucleate boiling with binary, ternary or multicomponent mixtures are available in the literature. These correlations are usually based on phase-equilibrium parameters. Direct calculation of the HTC in mixtures with hundreds of components, such as gasoline, is thus practically impossible, as the phase-equilibrium data for such mixtures cannot be easily obtained or calculated. In research fields such as droplet evaporation and mixture thermodynamics, surrogates are constantly used to replace these multicomponent mixtures in calculations; however, this method has not yet been used in boiling research. Here, gasoline surrogates are proposed to estimate the HTC during nucleate boiling. A Monte Carlo search for the optimal composition is used to find the surrogates, and their applicability to gasoline–ethanol blends is evaluated. Two of the surrogates tested matched the experimental data well: surrogate B (16.4% n-butane + 83.6% isooctane) and surrogate C (26.2% n-butane + 42.1% n-hexane + 31.7% isooctane). Both surrogates allowed the HTC for gasoline (3.6% and 3.5% overall average deviation, respectively) and gasoline–ethanol blends (5.6% and 6.9% deviation at $$400\,\hbox {kW/m}^2$$400kW/m2 heat flux, respectively) to be estimated accurately.