An Experimental Study on a Straight-Channel Printed Circuit Heat Exchanger for Supercritical CO2 Power Cycle Applications

A kind of compact plate-type heat exchanger, namely, Printed Circuit Heat Exchanger (PCHE) is one of the attractive options for S-CO2 Brayton Cycles, Because it can withstand higher temperature and pressure and has high surface-area-to-volume. The experiments were conducted for a NPIC straight-channel PCHE. In current study, we chose water as cold side fluid and S-CO2 as hot side fluid. Firstly, we fixed the cold side operation parameters to study heat transfer and pressure drop characteristics of the S-CO2 fluid side. Then we fixed the hot side operation parameters to study the pressure drop characteristics of the water side. Finally, existing heat transfer and friction correlations were used to compared with NPIC straight-channel PCHE experimental data and new correlations were developed.