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Research Paper
h i g h l i g h t s
Development and validation of PCHE design methodology for S-CO2 power cycle application.
Performance evaluation of designed PCHE under various CO2 phases.
Development of friction factor and heat transfer correlations with CFD obtained experimentally validated results.
a r t i c l e i n f o a b s t r a c t
Article history: The supercritical CO2 (S-CO2) power cycle is receiving worldwide attention as one of the promising
Received 21 June 2016 advanced future electricity generation technologies. Since the S-CO2 power cycle can achieve high effi-
Revised 17 November 2016 ciency with simple system configuration, the role of compact heat exchanger becomes more important
Accepted 19 November 2016
to achieve smaller system footprint. As an example of successful compact heat exchanger, the printed cir-
Available online 22 November 2016
cuit heat exchanger (PCHE) was recently suggested for the S-CO2 power cycle application due to the capa-
bility of enduring high pressure difference while providing large heat transfer area within a small volume.
Keywords:
However, the S-CO2 precooler operates very close to the critical point of CO2 where the conventional
S-CO2 power cycle
Supercritical fluid
design methodology may not be suitable due to substantial variation of the thermo-physical properties
Printed circuit heat exchanger near the critical point. Thus, in this paper the design and operation issues of PCHE as the precooler are
Experiment addressed. In this study, the verification of developed PCHE core design code and experimental test
CFD-analysis results are presented. The test conditions were 26–43 °C and 7.3–8.6 MPa in temperature and pressure,
respectively. In terms of non-dimensional numbers, the Reynolds number range is 15,000–100,000 and
the Prandtl number range is 2–33. Friction factor and heat transfer correlations were developed with
the experimental data and computational analysis for the future PCHE design as a precooler in the S-
CO2 power cycle.
Ó 2016 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.
http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.applthermaleng.2016.11.132
1359-4311/Ó 2016 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.
S. Baik et al. / Applied Thermal Engineering 113 (2017) 1536–1546 1537
Nomenclature
critical point and the turbine outlet condition (2) is still high tem- assures that the conventional heat exchanger design methodology
perature. Due to the high temperature of the turbine outlet tem- can be applied in this area [19–21]. Thus, the KAIST research team
perature, the system requires large amount of recuperation focused the applicability of the PCHE application as a precooler for
processes to maximize the use of available heat in the system. the S-CO2 power system. Furthermore, the off-design performance
One of the challenging engineering issues for developing S-CO2 of the PCHE was also experimentally investigated to contribute to
technology is designing a component which operates near the CO2 the future S-CO2 cycle control related research.
critical point (30.98 °C, 7.38 MPa) [5,8], such as a compressor or a In summary, the objectives of this study are the following:
precooler. Because of the dramatic change of the thermo-
dynamic properties in vicinity of the critical point, conventional (1) Development of PCHE design methodology which accurately
logarithmic mean temperature difference (LMTD) design methods reflects the real gas effects near the critical point.
based on constant property assumptions are not applicable. Fur- (2) Performance test under various CO2 conditions including
thermore computer aided design or computational analysis near gas, liquid and supercritical phases.
the critical point is challenging due to the dramatic change in prop- (3) Validation of the developed methodology with the obtained
erty with respect to pressure and temperature. experimental data.
However, experimental and computational studies on the pre- (4) Development of friction factor and heat transfer correlations
cooler cases near the critical point are not abundant and no study with the assistance from computational fluid analysis.
1538 S. Baik et al. / Applied Thermal Engineering 113 (2017) 1536–1546
3. CFD analysis
since the detailed channel geometry is known exactly, a CFD anal- same as cases 7 and 15, but different mass flow rate was tested
ysis was conducted to reproduce the channel internal flow infor- experimentally and numerically.
mation from the measured inlet and outlet data. At first, the The CFD analysis was performed with a commercial CFD code
hydraulic performance analysis was conducted without heat trans- ANSYS CFX v14.5. For the computation, realistic sharp corner and
fer. In order to consider the hydraulic characteristic, two different round corner domains were constructed to investigate the effect
cases were chosen. Case 7 and case 15 in Fig. 7 were selected due to of the channel corner shape. The computation domains are shown
the large density difference between two cases (2.5 times). Fur- with mesh conformation in Fig. 12. Due to the uncertainty issue
thermore, two cases were chosen for the experiment to CFD com- near the critical point, the NIST database based real gas property
parison, since two cases are the furthest from the pseudo-critical (RGP) table was generated and used. To setup the boundary condi-
line within the supercritical state regime. This means that the tions, experimental temperature and mass flowrate boundary con-
supercritical CO₂ properties behave similar to the normal gases ditions were used as the inlet condition and the pressure outlet
for these two cases and therefore, the properties effect is first sep- boundary condition was used for the outlet condition.
arated. By varying the mass flow rate, the two CO2 cases were ana- The mesh sensitivity study was conducted until the relative cal-
lyzed. The number followed by the case number and hyphen, culated results converge within 2%. To estimate the water side
which ranges from 1 to 5, means large to small mass flowrate for pressure drop, total 509,376 nodes and 492,881 meshes were used
each case. In other words, the inlet boundary conditions are the in the water domain. At the near wall, 10 sheets of inflated layers
S. Baik et al. / Applied Thermal Engineering 113 (2017) 1536–1546 1541
with 1.2 growth ratio were utilized. For CO2 side standard k-e tur- each corner. By exploring the flow field, larger flow reversal region
bulence model was used for the turbulent flow simulation. For the appeared in the sharp corner region. This is shown in Fig. 15.
CO2 domain, total 2,303,322 nodes and 2,241,846 meshes were
used to satisfy the y+ values close to 15 at the first node from the 3.2. Correlation development
wall [16].
The pressure drop calculation results are shown in Figs. 13 and A conjugate heat transfer problem was solved next with the
14. From the water side calculation results, round corner shape round corner computation domain and mesh, shown in Fig. 16.
showed reasonable pressure drop compared with the experimental The inlet and outlet boundary faces were modified slightly for
data than the sharp corner case. As mentioned above, the CO2 side the flow alignment with a straight extension to improve the con-
was turbulent flow while the water side was laminar flow. For the vergence during the iterations. For the solid part, 14.6 W/m K ther-
CO2 side, two different corner shape channels with standard k-e mal conductivity was used to simulate the SS316L heat transfer
turbulence model were studied to obtain reliable CFD results. plate, and k-e turbulence model was used to simulate the CO2 tur-
As shown in Fig. 14, the standard k-e turbulence model with bulent flow. As the boundary conditions, cases 7 & 15 experimental
round corner showed closer result with the experimental data boundary conditions are used.
compared to the sharp corner case. As a result, the sharp corner After obtaining the local information for every case, fluid
channel showed 40–65% larger pressure drop compared to the domains were divided into pitches to develop the friction factor
realistic round corner channel. The difference of the pressure drop and heat transfer coefficient correlations. For the hydraulic parts,
can be explained with occurrence of the reversed flow region at pressure drop in each pitch was transformed to normalized friction
1542 S. Baik et al. / Applied Thermal Engineering 113 (2017) 1536–1546
Table 2
Mass flow rate and Reynolds number of test cases.
Test case CO2 mass flow rate [kg/s] Reynolds number Water mass flow rate [kg/s] Reynolds number
1 4.04 65,529 0.28 170
2 4.00 65,290 0.31 188
3 4.09 71,144 0.32 192
4 3.96 74,110 0.19 116
5 3.94 73,094 0.21 129
6 3.83 78,350 0.22 133
7 3.88 80,004 0.17 104
8 3.37 95,034 0.15 90
9 2.57 102,784 0.14 87
10 3.16 102,717 0.11 64
11 2.14 86,085 0.07 42
12 2.04 91,913 0.06 36
13 1.94 90,023 0.07 42
14 1.93 89,897 0.09 54
15 1.67 82,128 0.05 32
16 1.44 73,682 0.06 34
factor by using Eq. (5). In this equation, the bulk mean velocity of constant value for single fluid single phase heat transfer. However,
each pitch was used. since the CO2 properties vary significantly near the critical point,
Prandtl number is not a constant value. In this experimental study,
1 D 2
f Fanning ¼ DP ð5Þ the Prandtl number range was from 2 to 33. Therefore, the devel-
4 l qv 2
oped CO2 side turbulent flow Nusselt number correlation includes
The heat transfer rate and averaged temperatures were Prandtl number effect. In Fig. 20, the power of Prandtl number in
obtained as well. The temperature of the wall was defined as the the Nusselt number correlation is determined by changing from
average temperature in one pitch, and the Eq. (3) was used again 0.5 to 2 until the best fitting curve is obtained [17].
to define the fluid bulk temperature. By following Eqs. (6) and In Figs. 17–20, the developed correlations were compared with
(7), Nusselt numbers can be obtained. the Ref. correlations [5,6]. The developed correlation in this study
showed reasonable agreement with the water side and CO2 side
Q
h¼ ð6Þ data. It is interesting to observe that while the value of friction fac-
AðT T wall Þ tor from the newly developed correlation decreased compared to
the reference correlation but the Nusselt number is the opposite
hD to the friction factor case. From the turbulent flow theory generally
Nu ¼ ð7Þ
k friction pressure drop increase and heat transfer enhancement
According to the convective heat transfer theory [13], in turbu- occur at the same time, but in this case the trend is different.
lent flow, the normalized convective heat transfer coefficient Nus- The differences in this case can be explained with the flow separa-
selt number is a function of Reynolds number and Prandtl number. tion. As more regions are affected by the flow reversal in the sharp
In most engineering flow, Prandtl number can be regarded as a corner, the flow resistance is increased as well as the pressure
S. Baik et al. / Applied Thermal Engineering 113 (2017) 1536–1546 1543
qv 2
DP ¼ K form ð9Þ
2
As a result, the KAIST_HXD code prediction results showed sat-
isfying agreement with the experimental data. The heat transfer
performance prediction difference was under 7% and hot side
and cold side pressure drop prediction differences were within
12% and 14%, respectively. Fig. 21 shows the improved pressure
drop estimation results of hot and cold sides. From the validation
results with modified correlation and additional form losses, it
was concluded that the design results from the KAIST_HXD are
now reliable.
Fig. 11. Comparison of KAIST_HXD pressure drop estimations. The printed circuit heat exchanger (PCHE) received significant
attention for the S-CO2 power cycle application due to high com-
pactness and high effectiveness. In order to evaluate a PCHE perfor-
drop. For the heat transfer, the flow reversal region will cause an mance, KAIST research team designed and manufactured a lab-
increase in the thermal resistance by shadowing the heat transfer scale PCHE. In this study, experiment and CFD analysis were used
area with low flow. Therefore, the reference correlation for sharp for developing a PCHE design methodology that can be applied to
corner can have higher friction while lower heat transfer than the S-CO2 system. Due to the lack of experimental and computa-
the newly developed correlation in this study. tional studies on the precooler, which operates near the critical
The developed correlations are tabulated in Table 3. It is noted point, this study focused on the PCHE for the precooler of the S-
that the developed realistic round corner correlations are pitch- CO2 power system. From the experimental study, the designed
averaged value, which the zigzag channel form loss and skin fric- PCHE showed satisfying heat transfer performance for both on-
tion loss effects are smeared in one equation form. design and off-design conditions. The PCHE showed over 90% effec-
tiveness within 200 mm small core.
4. PCHE design code validation and discussion In order to understand the local effect and obtain the local infor-
mation, two cases of CFD studies were conducted based on the
4.1. KAIST_HXD code evaluation experimental data. From the first CFD study result for sharp and
round corner cases, the authors concluded that the realistic round
In order to verify the developed PCHE design code with the corner channel can reduce the pressure drop up to 40–65% rather
developed correlations, the KAIST_HXD code was modified with than using a sharp corner channel. The reduction of the flow resis-
the newly developed correlations. The identical internal geometry tance difference was explained by the decreased flow reversal
was implemented into the code to predict the heat exchanger per- region in the smooth corner. During the CFD analysis, it was found
formance for off-design conditions and the results were compared that the standard k-e turbulence model was reliable to simulate
with the data. flow along with the realistic micro zigzag channel geometry using
However, the measurement in experiment includes additional the supercritical CO2.
form losses at the inlet and the outlet due to the header part. From the CFD results, two sets of friction factor and heat trans-
The authors modeled four additional form losses, so the measured fer correlations were developed for the water side laminar flow
total pressure drop can be estimated with Eq. (8). regime and the CO2 side turbulent flow regime respectively. With
DPtotal ¼ DPInletHeader þ DPEntrance þ DPInternalflow þ DPExit the modification of correlations in the heat exchanger design code,
better agreement for the pressure drop and heat transfer predic-
þ DPOutletHeader ð8Þ tion with the data was observed. The authors concluded that the
Fig. 13. Water side pressure drop comparison depending on corner shape.
main logic and the design result of the developed KAIST_HXD code
are reliable and also the correlation can be utilized for a PCHE
design operating near the critical point in the future. The devel-
Fig. 14. CO2 side pressure drop comparison depending on corner shape and oped correlations can be applied to design a larger PCHE for the
turbulence model. S-CO₂ precooler which the operating conditions are different from
Fig. 15. Velocity field differences from sharp and round corner.
S. Baik et al. / Applied Thermal Engineering 113 (2017) 1536–1546 1545
Table 3
Derived correlations.
Table 4
Form loss pressure drop coefficients.
Form factor
Inlet Header Entrance expansion 0.72
Sudden contraction 0.42
Outlet Header Sudden expansion 1
Exit contraction 0.05
Acknowledgement
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