Numerical Investigations on Supercritical Heat Transfer Characteristics of JP-10

Abstract

A numerical study on the JP-10's heat transfer characteristics in a horizontal circular tube under supercritical conditions has been conducted to understand the heat transfer process in the Scramjet engines cooling channels with JP-10 as a coolant. This study has been carried out in turbulent flow regimes, and the Realizable k-ε model was used for turbulence modeling. The effect of pressure and the heat flux on heat transfer coefficient was analyzed. The heat transfer deterioration (HTD) phenomena were observed when inner wall reached pseudo- critical temperature. Heat transfer enhancement (HTE) was also observed during this study. However, it occurred when the bulk fluid temperature was above the pseudo-critical temperature at 4 MPa and below the pseudo-critical temperature at 5 MPa, which looks unusual with property variation. The relevance of two established heat transfer empirical correlations for Nusselt number estimation has been examined. The correlation developed by Bae-kim has successfully predicted both the HTD and HTE phenomena for some cases.