Assessment of Supercritical Heat Transfer Prediction Methods

Abstract

A large supercritical water databank has been compiled at the University of Ottawa (UO). This databank originally contained 36,030 tube data points. After a thorough screening process, during which duplicate and unreliable data and obvious outliers were removed, a final databank was assembled, containing more than 24,000 screened data points. This databank is the result of the combination of four different databases, the more recent one being the University of Ontario Institute of Technology database. The UO combined databank covers a wide range of near- critical and supercritical heat transfer (SCHT) conditions and is used for the assessment of existing SCHT correlations and the derivation of the transcritical heat transfer look-up table. Twelve SCHT correlations and four single-phase heat transfer correlations have been applied to the combined UO databank. The assessed SCHT prediction methods include four correlations that were developed recently, with one of these correlations published in 2010. An error analysis and an examination of the parametric trends were performed for the most promising correlations. The result of the assessment showed that the heat transfer coefficient was predicted more accurately by the recent correlations in the three supercritical heat transfer regions: (i) close to the critical or pseudo-critical point, (ii) the high-density or liquid-like state and (iii) the low- density or gas-like state. The most accurate correlations will be used in the construction of the skeleton look-up table that is currently under development at UO.