Comparison of Existing Supercritical Carbon Dioxide Heat Transfer Correlations for Horizontal and Vertical Bare Tubes

This paper presents a thorough analysis of ability of various heat transfer correlations to predict wall temperatures and Heat Transfer Coefficients (HTCs) against experiments on internal forced-convective heat transfer to supercritical carbon dioxide conducted by Koppel [1], He [2], Kim [3] and Bae [4]. It should be noted the Koppel dataset was taken from a paper which used the Koppel data but was not written by Koppel. All experiments were completed in bare tubes with diameters from 0.948 mm to 9 mm for horizontal and vertical configurations. The datasets contain a total of 1573 wall temperature points with pressures ranging from 7.58 to 9.59 MPa, mass fluxes of 400 to 1641 kg/m2s and heat fluxes from 20 to 225 kW/m2. The main objective of the study was to compare several correlations and select the best of them in predicting HTC and wall temperature values for supercritical carbon dioxide. This study will be beneficial for analyzing heat exchangers involving supercritical carbon dioxide, and for verifying scaling parameters between CO2 and other fluids. In addition, supercritical carbon dioxide’s use as a modeling fluid is necessary as the costs of experiments are lower than supercritical water. The datasets were compiled and calculations were performed to find HTCs and wall and bulk-fluid temperatures using existing correlations. Calculated results were compared with the experimental ones. The correlations used were Mokry et al. [5], Swenson et al. [6] and a set of new correlations presented in Gutpa et al. [7]. Statistical error calculations were performed are presented in the paper.