The investigation on the heat transfer characteristics for supercritical pressure water (SCW) is of value for the development of the supercritical water-cooled nuclear reactor (SCWR). As an important heat transfer enhancement element, heat transfer for SCW in internally-ribbed tubes was still not solved, though lots of experimental studies have been published and a great many heat transfer correlations were proposed.
This paper presented an analysis of heat transfer in the internally-ribbed tubes, through comparing heat transfer correlations for SCW gained from different internally-ribbed tubes under the same operating condition. It was found that all existing heat transfer correlations reported could not been well applied for various internally-ribbed tubes with large deviation between prediction results and experimental values, because rib geometry had a great influence on heat transfer of internally-ribbed tubes. On the basis of experimental data collected from open literature for internally-ribbed tubes, a new general calculation correlation of heat transfer coefficient for SCW was developed for various internally-ribbed tubes by combining an optimized empirical correlation for vertically-upward smooth tubes and four dimensionless numbers of rib geometry.
The results show that the calculated values of the new present correlation is in reasonable agreement with available experimental data collected. Moreover, the new correlation was verified well by experiment data of two new-type internally-ribbed tubes performed beyond the above experimental database.
