Heat Transfer Characteristics of Downward Supercritical Kerosene Flow in Minitubes

The heat transfer characteristics of supercritical China RP-3 aviation kerosene flowing downward in a vertical circular tube are numerically investigated. A ten-species surrogate model is used to calculate the thermophysical properties of kerosene and the Re-Normalization Group (RNG) k-ε model with the enhanced wall treatment is adopted to simulate the turbulent flow. The effects of diameter, wall heat flux, and pressure on temperature and heat transfer coefficient are studied. The numerical results show three types of heat transfer deterioration exist along the flow direction. The first deterioration at the tube inlet region is caused by the development of the thermal boundary layer, which exist whatever the operation condition is. The second and third kind of deterioration take place when the inner wall temperature or the bulk fuel temperature approaches the pseudo-critical temperature under a pressure close to the critical value. The heat transfer coefficients increase with decreasing diameter and increasing pressure. The increase of inlet pressure can effectively eliminate the deteriorations because the thermophysical properties change less near the critical point at higher pressure. The decrease of wall heat flux will delay the onsets of the second and third kind of deterioration. The numerical heat transfer coefficient fit well with the empirical correlations.