Convective flow boiling in sub-cooled fluids is recognized as one of the few means of accommodating very high heat fluxes. There are many available correlations for predicting the inner wall temperature of the heated duct in the several regimes of the empirical Nukiyama boiling curve, although unfortunately there is no physical fundamentals of such curve. Recently, the author has shown that the classical entropy balance could contain key information about boiling heat transfer. So, it was found that the average thermal gap in the heated channel (the inner wall temperature minus the average temperature of the coolant fluid) was strongly correlated with the efficiency of a theoretical reversible engine placed in this thermal gap. From this new correlation, a new boiling curve plotting the wall temperature versus the average,e fluid temperature was derived and successfully checked against low- and high-pressure water data. This curve suggested a new and simple definition of the critical heat flux (CHF) namely, the value of the coolant average temperature at the maximum. In this work, after briefly reviewing the entropy balance of a non-equilibrium boiling flow and its relationship with the thermodynamic average temperature and the law of stable equilibrium (LSE), the possibilities of the new approach for the design of flow boiling cooling systems are highlighted. Finally, the strong correlation found between the reversible engine efficiency and the thermal driving force is verified again, now with high-pressure refrigerant 22 (R-22) data. (C) 2004 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.