Experimental Study on Heat Transfer of Supercritical Kerosene in a Vertical Upward Tube

Abstract

A research on the heat transfer performance of kerosene flowing in a vertical upward tube at supercritical pressure is presented. In the experiments, insights are offered on the effects of the factors such as mass flow rate, heat flux and pressure. It is found that increasing the mass flow rate could enhance the heat transfer performances, while increasing the working pressure will deteriorate the heat transfer. Besides, the effect of heat flux on heat transfer is complicated. Based on the analysis of experimental data, enhancement of heat transfer occurs when the inner wall temperature of tube is higher than pseudo-critical temperature while the bulk fluid temperature is lower than the pseudo-critical temperature. At the supercritical conditions, heat transfer is influenced by the significant changes in thermo-physical properties, thus accurate evaluations of the thermo-physical properties become the key for the supercritical heat transfer calculations. The extended corresponding-state principle could be used for evaluating the density and the transport properties of kerosene, including its viscosity and thermal conductivity, at different temperatures and pressures. In order to obtain the numerical values of the heat capacity, a Soave–Redlich–Kwong (SRK) equation of state is used. The correlation for predicting heat transfer in kerosene at supercritical pressure is established, the calculation results from this correlation are in good agreement with the experimental results.