Look-Up Table for Wall Temperature of Vertically-Upward Round Tube with Heat Transfer to Supercritical Water

Author(s):  
Fucheng Chang ◽  
Wen Chan ◽  
Lele Wang ◽  
Yuhao Shang ◽  
Yuan Feng ◽  
...  
2008 ◽  
Vol 50 (2-6) ◽  
pp. 532-538 ◽  
Author(s):  
Matthias F. Loewenberg ◽  
Eckart Laurien ◽  
Andreas Class ◽  
Thomas Schulenberg

Author(s):  
Sarah Mokry ◽  
Igor Pioro

It is expected that the next generation of water-cooled nuclear reactors will operate at supercritical pressures (∼25 MPa) and high coolant temperatures (350–625°C). In support of the development of SuperCritical Water-cooled Reactors (SCWRs), research is currently being conducted for heat-transfer at supercritical conditions. Currently, there are no experimental datasets for heat transfer from power reactor fuel bundles to the fuel coolant (water) available in open literature. Therefore, for preliminary calculations, heat-transfer correlations obtained with bare-tube data can be used as a conservative approach. A number of empirical generalized correlations, based on experimentally obtained datasets, have been proposed to calculate Heat Transfer Coefficients (HTCs) in forced convective heat transfer for various fluids, including water, at supercritical pressures. These bare-tube-based correlations are available in various literature sources. There have been a number of methods applied to correlate heat transfer data. The most conventional approach, which accounts for property variations in the data, is to modify the classical Dittus-Boelter equation for forced convection. However, analysis and comparison of these correlations has shown that differences in HTC values can be up to several hundred percent. In general, the familiar correlations of Dittus-Boelter and Bishop et al. have used the bulk-fluid temperature approach for characteristic temperature properties evaluations. However, at high heat fluxes, fluid near the tube-wall will have a temperature close to that of the wall temperature. This might be significantly different from the bulk-fluid temperature. Therefore, another approach can be used based on the wall temperature as the characteristic temperature. The Swenson et al. correlation is based upon this approach. Finally, a third approach has been considered in which the film-temperature is used as the characteristic temperature (Tf = (Tw+Tb) / 2). McAdams et al. based their correlation for annuli on this approach. Therefore, the objective of this paper is to evaluate the three characteristic temperature approaches, (1) Bulk-fluid temperature approach; (2) Wall-temperature approach; and (3) Film-temperature approach, and determine which characteristic temperature method can most accurately predict supercritical water heat transfer coefficients. Both classical correlations and more recently developed correlations are considered in this investigation.


Author(s):  
Dong Yang ◽  
Qixian Wu ◽  
Lin Chen ◽  
Igor Pioro

Abstract Thermal efficiency and safety of Generation-IV nuclear-power-reactor concept - Supercritical Water-cooled Reactor (SCWR) depend on solid knowledge of specifics of SCW thermophysical properties and heat transfer within these conditions. As a preliminary, but conservative approach to uncover these specifics is analysis of experimental data obtained in bare tubes including numerical investigation. This paper presents the numerical investigation, based on computational fluid dynamics, of the heat-transfer characteristics of SCW flow in a 4-m long circular tube (ID = 10 mm). The flow and heat-transfer mechanism of SCW in the vertical tube under the influence of buoyancy and flow acceleration are analyzed. Results of numerical simulation predict the experimental data with reasonable accuracy. The results indicated that in the region of q/G > 0.4 kJ/kg, the wall temperature distribution tends to be non-linear, and heat transfer may deteriorate. When Tb < Tpc < Tw, internal wall temperature shows peaks, which corresponds to heat-transfer deterioration. Meanwhile the position, where the deterioration occurs is continuously moved forward to the inlet as the heat flux increases. Velocity changes near the wall show an M shape according to mass conservation for the density change.


Author(s):  
Tiberiu Preda ◽  
Eugene Saltanov ◽  
Igor Pioro ◽  
Kamiel S. Gabriel

Currently, increase in thermodynamic efficiency of water-cooled Nuclear Power Plants (NPPs) can only be achieved by raising the coolant’s operating conditions above the supercritical point. The critical point of water is 22.06 MPa and 373.95°C, making supercritical water research very power-intensive and expensive. CO2 behaves in a similar manner once in the supercritical state, but at significantly lower pressure and temperature, since critical point of CO2 is 7.37 MPa and 30.98°C. The applications of supercritical CO2 research range from using it as a modelling fluid, to supercritical turbine applications in Liquid Metal Fast Breeder Reactors (LMFBRs), and use in a supercritical Brayton cycle. Therefore, it is of prime importance to model its behaviour as accurately as possible. For this purpose, experimental data of Koppel (1960), He (2005), Kim (2005) and Bae (2007) for CO2 were analyzed, and a new correlation was developed. The dataset consists of 1409 wall temperature points with pressures ranging from 7.58 to 9.58 MPa, mass fluxes from 419 to 1200 kg/m2s, and heat fluxes from 20 to 130 kW/m2. All runs take place in bare tubes of inner diameters from 0.948 to 9.00 mm in both vertical and horizontal configurations. The proposed correlation takes a wall-temperature approach to predicting the Nusselt number. This paper compares the new correlation with other work which has been done at the University of Ontario Institute of Technology by Mokry et al. (2009), as well as with correlations by Swenson et al. (1965) and Dittus-Boelter (1930). It was found that the new correlation has an overall RMS error of 13% for Heat Transfer Coefficient (HTC) values and 5% for calculated wall temperature values. The correlation can be used as a conservative approach to predict wall temperature values in Supercritical Water Reactor (SCWR) preliminary calculations, to predict heat transfer in secondary-loop turbine/ heat exchanger applications, as with the LMFBR, and to help validate scaling parameters used for water and other coolants.


Author(s):  
Yevgeniy Gospodinov ◽  
Sarah Mokry ◽  
Pavel Kirillov ◽  
Igor Pioro

This paper presents selected results on heat transfer to supercritical water flowing upward in a 4-m-long vertical bare tube. Supercritical water heat-transfer data were obtained at pressures of about 24 MPa, mass fluxes of 200 – 1500 kg/m2s, heat fluxes up to 884 kW/m2 and inlet temperatures from 320 to 350°C for several combinations of wall and bulk-fluid temperatures that were below, at or above the pseudocritical temperature. In general, the experiments confirmed that there are three heat-transfer regimes for forced convective heat transfer to water flowing inside tubes at supercritical pressures: (1) normal heat-transfer regime characterized in general with heat transfer coefficients (HTCs) similar to those of subcritical convective heat transfer far from critical or pseudocritical regions, which are calculated according to the Dittus-Boelter type correlations; (2) deteriorated heat-transfer regime with lower values of the HTC and hence higher values of wall temperature within some part of a test section compared to those of the normal heat-transfer regime; and (3) improved heat-transfer regime with higher values of the HTC and hence lower values of wall temperature within some part of a test section compared to those of normal heat-transfer regime. These new heat-transfer data are applicable as a reference dataset for future comparison with supercritical-water bundle data and for a verification of scaling parameters between water and modeling fluids. Also, these HTC data were compared to those calculated with the original Dittus-Boelter and Bishop et al. correlations. The comparison showed that the Bishop et al. correlation, which uses the cross-section average Prandtl number, represents HTC profiles more correctly along the heated length of the tube than the Dittus-Boelter correlation. In general, the Bishop et al. correlation shows a good agreement with the experimental HTCs outside the pseudocritical region, however, overpredicts the experimental HTCs within the pseudocritical region. The Dittus-Boelter correlation can also predict the experimental HTCs outside the pseudocritical region, but deviates significantly from the experimental data within the pseudocritical region. It should be noted that both these correlations cannot be used for a prediction of HTCs within the deteriorated heat-transfer regime.


Author(s):  
Zhi Shang ◽  
Yufeng Yao

CFD investigation of heat transfer in supercritical water-cooled flow through fuel rod bundles has been carried out, using commercial software STAR-CD 4.02 with specific ad hoc user routines for modeling physical property of supercritical water. The configuration considered is a typical core assembly of 3×3 fuel rod (round tube) bundles inside solid square box, as seen in the nuclear reactor. After priori mesh convergence studies, investigations are focused on key characteristics of flow and heat transfer performance, notably the wall temperature distributions, the mass flux and the secondary flow patterns in the cross-section. It is found that the rod wall temperature distributions exhibit highly non-uniform feature near the domain exit with very high wall temperatures: about 625°C observed on the corner rod and about 562.5°C on the border rod, respectively. It is believed that the appearance of the extremely wall temperature may be related to the non-uniform distributions of mass flux in the cross-section of the bundles as the low mass flux co-existing with the high wall temperature. Further analysis of the secondary flow in the cross-section reveals wider spectrum of vortex flow structures, more complicated than previously noted by the sub-channel analysis. To verify the influence of turbulence models on the secondary flow, both linear and non-linear k-ε models are applied and results are quite similar. This finding indicates that the cause of the secondary (cross) flow might not be solely due to the anisotropic property of turbulence as suggested by other researchers. The present 3D CFD study provides more complete database of 3×3 rod bundle flows and will be useful to improve the industry practice of applying the sub-channel analysis.


Author(s):  
Sarah Mokry ◽  
Amjad Farah ◽  
Krysten King ◽  
Sahil Gupta ◽  
Igor Pioro ◽  
...  

This paper presents an analysis of heat-transfer to SuperCritical Water (SCW) in bare vertical tubes. A large set of experimental data, obtained in Russia, was analyzed and a new heat-transfer correlation for SCW was developed. This experimental dataset was obtained within conditions similar to those for proposed SuperCritical Water-cooled nuclear Reactor (SCWR) concepts. Thus, the new correlation presented in this paper can be used for preliminary heat-transfer calculations in SCWR fuel channels. The experimental dataset was obtained for SCW flowing upward in a 4-m-long vertical bare tube. The data was collected at pressures of about 24 MPa for several combinations of wall and bulk-fluid temperatures that were below, at, or above the pseudocritical temperature. The values ranged for mass flux from 200–1500 kg/m2s, for heat flux up to 1250 kW/m2 and for inlet temperatures from 320 to 350°C. Previous studies have confirmed that there are three heat-transfer regimes for forced convective heat transfer to water flowing inside tubes at supercritical pressures: (1) Normal Heat-Transfer (NHT) regime; (2) Deteriorated Heat-Transfer (DHT) regime, characterized by lower than expected Heat Transfer Coefficients (HTCs) (i.e., higher than expected wall temperatures) than in the NHT regime; and (3) Improved Heat-Transfer (IHT) regime with higher-than-expected HTC values, and thus lower values of wall temperature within some part of a test section compared to those of the NHT regime. Also, previous studies have shown that the HTC values calculated with the Dittus-Boelter and Bishop et al. correlations deviate quite substantially from those obtained experimentally. In particular, the Dittus-Boelter correlation significantly over predicts the experimental data within the pseudocritical range. A new heat-transfer correlation for forced convective heat-transfer in the NHT regime to SCW in a bare vertical tube is presented in this paper. It has demonstrated a relatively good fit for HTC values (±25%) and for wall temperature calculations (±15%) for the analyzed dataset. This correlation can be used for supercritical water heat exchangers linked to indirect-cycle concepts and the co-generation of hydrogen, for future comparisons with other independent datasets, with bundle data, as the reference case, for the verification of computer codes for SCWR core thermalhydraulics and for the verification of scaling parameters between water and modeling fluids.


Sign in / Sign up

Export Citation Format

Share Document