Theoretical investigations on heat transfer to H2O/CO2 mixtures in supercritical region

LF Chen and D Liu and HL Zhang and Q Li, SCIENCE CHINA-TECHNOLOGICAL SCIENCES, 63, 1018-1024 (2020).

DOI: 10.1007/s11431-019-1515-3

The supercritical H2O/CO2 mixture is the working fluid to drive a turbine in a novel power generation system with coal gasified in supercritical water. This system is promising because of zero pollution emission in contrast to the conventional coal-fired power plant. Heat transfer coefficients of the supercritical H2O/CO2 mixtures are important to design heat transfer devices in this system, which is similar to the role of heat transfer to supercritical water in conventional systems. However, heat transfer to supercritical mixtures has received less attention. Here, we show that the supercritical mixtures with H2O being one of the components, have similar convection heat transfer behavior to supercritical pure fluids for temperatures and pressures above the critical point of H2O. This phenomenon was demonstrated from two aspects. Firstly, the forced convection heat transfer coefficients of supercritical mixtures were numerically calculated using the simulation model for supercritical pure fluids and using the thermophysical properties (density, heat capacity, thermal conductivity and viscosity) of supercritical mixtures as input. The calculated results agree well with experimental data in the supercritical region. Secondly, the calculated results also agree well with the correlations for supercritical pure fluids. The mechanisms were investigated by molecular dynamics simulations on the diffusion of supercritical mixtures. These results lay the foundation for predicting convection heat transfer coefficients of supercritical mixtures and for designing heat transfer devices with supercritical mixtures as heat transfer fluids.

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