Turbulent Prandtl number (Prt) has a great impact on the performance of turbulence models in predicting heat transfer of supercritical fluids. Unrealistic treatment of Prt may lead to large deviations of the prediction results from experimental data under supercritical conditions. In this study, the effect of Prt on heat transfer of supercritical water was extensively studied by using shear stress transport (SST) k–ω turbulence model, and the results suggested that using the existing Prt models would lead to failures in predicting the heat transfer characteristics of supercritical water under deteriorated heat transfer (dht) conditions. A new variable Prt model was proposed with the Prt varied with pressure, turbulent viscosity ratio, and molecular Prandtl number. The new model was validated by comparing the numerical results with the corresponding experimental data, and it was found that the new variable Prt model exhibited better performance on reproducing the dht of supercritical water in vertical tubes than those of the existing Prt models.
Supercritical pressure water (SCW) has been widely used in many engineering fields and industries, such as fossil fuel-fired power plants, newly developed Gen-IV nuclear power plants and so forth. Heat transfer characteristics of SCW are of great importance for both design and safe operation of the related systems. Many heat transfer correlations have been developed in the history for predicting the heat transfer characteristics of SCW. However, the prediction accuracy of the existing correlations is less than satisfactory, especially in the cases with deteriorated heat transfer (DHT) because of the severe and quick variation in thermal physical properties of SCW in the vicinity of the fluids' pseudo critical point. It is very necessary to develop new correlations for the heat transfer of SCW to meet the engineering requirements for satisfactory prediction of the heat transfer behavior of SCW. In this chapter, experimental data on heat transfer of SCW are extensively collected from published literatures, and the performance of the existing heat transfer correlations for SCW are reviewed and quantitatively evaluated against the collected experimental data, and then a new heat transfer correlation for SCW with high prediction accuracy is proposed.
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