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The purpose of this study is to determine the sealing performance of face seals by numerical analysis of thermoelastohydrodynamic characteristics of supercritical CO₂ (S-CO₂) spiral groove face seals in the supercritical regime.

The spiral groove face seal was used as the research object. The distribution of lubricating film pressure and temperature was analysed by solving the gas state, Reynolds and energy equations using the finite difference method. Furthermore, the influence law of sealing performance was obtained.

Close to the critical temperature of S-CO₂, face distortions produced by increasing pressure lead to divergent clearance and resulted in reduced opening force. In the state of S-CO₂, the face distortions generated by increasing seal temperature lead to convergent clearance, which enhances the opening force. In addition, near the critical temperature of S-CO₂, the opening force may be reduced by 10%, and the leakage rate of the seal sharply increases by a factor of four.

The thermoelastohydrodynamic characteristics of supercritical CO₂ face seals are illustrated considering the actual gas effect including compressibility, heat capacity and viscosity. Face distortions and sealing performance were calculated under different seal pressures and seal temperatures in the supercritical regime, as well as with N₂ for comparison.

The peer review history for this article is available at: https://publons.com/publon/10.1108/ILT-05-2020-0169/

The purpose of this paper is to numerically investigate the heat transfer performance of aviation kerosene flowing in smooth and enhanced tubes with asymmetric fins at supercritical pressures and to reveal the effects of several key parameters, such as mass flow rate, heat flux, pressure and inlet temperature on the heat transfer.

A CFD approach is taken and the strong variations of the thermo-physical properties as the critical point is passed are taken into account. The RNG k-ε model is applied for simulating turbulent flow conditions.

The numerical results reveal that the heat transfer coefficient increases with increasing mass flow rate and inlet temperature. The effect of heat flux on heat transfer is more complicated, while the effect of pressure on heat transfer is insignificant. The considered asymmetric fins have a small effect on the fluid temperature, but the wall temperature is reduced significantly by the asymmetric fins compared to that of the corresponding smooth tube. As a result, the asymmetric finned tube leads to a significant heat transfer enhancement (an increase in the heat transfer coefficient about 23-41 percent). The enhancement might be caused by the re-development of velocity and temperature boundary layers in the enhanced tubes. With the asymmetric fins, the pressure loss in the enhanced tubes is slightly larger than that in the smooth tube. A thermal performance factor is applied for combined evaluation of heat transfer enhancement and pressure loss.

The asymmetric fins also caused an increased pressure loss. A thermal performance factor ? was used for combined evaluation of heat transfer enhancement and pressure loss. Results show that the two enhanced tubes perform better than the smooth tube. The enhanced tube 2 gave better overall heat transfer performance than the enhanced tube 1. It is suggested that the geometric parameters of the asymmetric fins should be optimized to further improve the thermal performance and also various structures need to be investigated.

The asymmetric fins increased the pressure loss. The evaluation of heat transfer enhancement and pressure loss Results showed that the two enhanced tubes perform better than the smooth tube. It is suggested that the geometric parameters of the asymmetric fins should be optimized to further improve the thermal performance and also various structures need to be investigated to make the results more engineering useful.

The paper presents unique solutions for thermal performance of a fluid at near critical state in smooth and enhanced tubes. The findings are of relevance for design and thermal optimization particularly in aerospace applications.

Steam contamination (solid particles in the superheated steam) comes from the boiler water largely in the carry‐over of water droplets. The need for extreme purity of steam for use in high pressure turbines has prompted the development of highly satisfactory devices for separating steam and water in a boiler drum. Consequently, steam contamination has been steadily reduced. Troublesome turbine blade deposits may occur with surprisingly low (0.6 ppm) total solids contamination in steam. In the 3.5–6 MPa range, however these deposits are usually water soluble and can be removed by periodic washing. In the 4 to 10 MPa range, however, silica deposits predominate and these deposits are not easily removed by water washing. With operating pressure of 13 MPa and above insoluble deposits do occur which may be controlled by residual water washing. Before the unit is returned to service, the deposits should be removed by air or water‐driven turbine cleaners or by chemical cleaning.

This study aims to show the importance of natural convection of supercritical fluid in an inclined cavity. The heat transfer performance of natural convection can be improved.

A model of an inclined cavity was set up to simulate the natural convection of supercritical fluid. The influence of inclined angles (30 to approximately 90°) and pressures (8 to approximately 12 MPa) are analyzed. To ascertain flow and heat transfer of supercritical fluid natural convection, this paper conducts a numerical investigation using the lattice Boltzmann method (LBM), which is proven to be precise and convenient.

The results show that the higher heat transfer performance can be obtained with an inclined angle of 30°. It is also presented that the heat transfer performance under pressure of 10 MPa is the best. In addition, common criterion number correlations of average Nusselt number are also fitted.

These study results can provide a theoretical reference for the study of heat transfer of supercritical fluid natural convection in engineering.

The objective of the present work is to simulate the nuclear coupled thermal–hydraulic fast transient case studies for a vertically up-flowing supercritical pressure water channel of circular cross section. The emphasis is on analyzing the phenomenon of the deterioration in heat transfer (DHT) inside the channel subjected to sharp pressure variations.

The thermal–hydraulic model, THRUST, is integrated with the neutron point kinetic (NPK) solver to account for the non-linear interactions between the thermal–hydraulic and neutronic temperature and density reactivity feedback effects. The model implemented and studied accounts for the time-dependent reactor power and is used to analyze various steady-state and flow-induced transient case studies (time-dependent and step change in exit pressure).

There is good agreement in the predicted behavior of the supercritical water pressure system with that of the available experimental data for the steady-state case. The event of DHT in the second transient case (step decrease in exit pressure) is found to be more severe than that of exponential pressure decrease.

This study evaluated a novel implementation of the thermal–hydraulic model, THRUST, integrated with NPKs applied to supercritical pressure water systems for predicting DHT.

This paper aims to comprehensively clarify the research status of thermal transport of supercritical aviation kerosene, with particular interests in the effect of cracking on heat transfer.

A brief review of current research on supercritical aviation kerosene is presented in views of the surrogate model of hydrocarbon fuels, chemical cracking mechanism of hydrocarbon fuels, thermo-physical properties of hydrocarbon fuels, turbulence models, flow characteristics and thermal performances, which indicates that more efforts need to be directed into these topics. Therefore, supercritical thermal transport of n-decane is then computationally investigated in the condition of thermal pyrolysis, while the ASPEN HYSYS gives the properties of n-decane and pyrolysis products. In addition, the one-step chemical cracking mechanism and SST k-ω turbulence model are applied with relatively high precision.

The existing surrogate models of aviation kerosene are limited to a specific scope of application and their thermo-physical properties deviate from the experimental data. The turbulence models used to implement numerical simulation should be studied to further improve the prediction accuracy. The thermal-induced acceleration is driven by the drastic density change, which is caused by the production of small molecules. The wall temperature of the combustion chamber can be effectively reduced by this behavior, i.e. the phenomenon of heat transfer deterioration can be attenuated or suppressed by thermal pyrolysis.

The issues in numerical studies of supercritical aviation kerosene are clearly revealed, and the conjugation mechanism between thermal pyrolysis and convective heat transfer is initially presented.

The purpose of this paper is to numerically study the influence of wall conduction on the heat transfer of supercritical n-decane in the active regenerative cooling channels.

A horizontally placed rectangular pipe with a solid zone and another one without a solid zone were used. A drastic variation of thermo-physical properties was emphatically addressed. After the verification of mesh and turbulence models comparing with the experimental results, a mesh number of 4.5 M and the low Reynolds number SST k-ω turbulence model were chosen. The solution of the governing equations and the acquisition of the numerical results were executed by the commercial software FLUENT 2020 R1.

The numerical results indicate that there is a heat transfer deterioration (HTD) potential for the upper wall, lower wall and sidewall with the decrease of mass flux. Due to wall conduction, the distribution of the fluid temperature at spanwise-normal planes becomes uniform and this feature also takes advantage of the relatively uniform transverse velocity. For the streamwise-normal planes, the low fluid temperature appears close to the upper wall at the region near the sidewall and vice versa for the region near the centre. Undoubtedly, the secondary flow at the cross-section plays a crucial role in this process and the relatively cool mainstream is affected by the vortices.

This study warns that the wall conduction must be considered in the practical design and thermal optimization due to the sensibility of thermo-physical properties to the heat flux. The secondary flow caused by the buoyancy force (gravity) plays a significant role in the supercritical heat transfer and mixed convection heat transfer should be further studied.

Work in the field of research and technology of the transonic or supercritical wing is aimed at improving the flight performance and economy of civil transports. These improvements concern a new shaping of the wing profile with increased lift capacity and reduced drag. Higher lift permits smaller wing areas.

Spiral-wound heat exchangers (SWHEs) are widely used in different industries. In special applications, such as cryogenic (HEs), fluid properties may significantly depend on fluid temperature. This paper aims to present an analytical method for design and rating of SWHEs considering variable fluid properties with consistent shell geometry and single-phase fluid.

To consider variations of fluid properties, the HE is divided into identical segments, and the fluid properties are assumed to be constant in each segment. Validation of the analytical method is accomplished by using three-dimensional numerical simulation with shear stress transport k-ω model, and the numerical model is verified by using the experimental data. Moreover, the HE cost is selected as the main criterion in obtaining the proper design, and the most affordable geometry is selected as the proper design.

The accuracy of different heat transfer and pressure drop correlations is investigated by comparing the analytical and numerical results. The average errors in the calculation of effectiveness, shell-side pressure drop and tube-side pressure drop using the analytical method are 2.1%, 13.9% and 13.3%, respectively. Moreover, the effect of five main geometrical parameters on the SWHE cost is investigated. The results indicate that the effect of longitudinal pitch ratio on the SWHE cost can be neglected, whereas other geometrical parameters have a significant impact on the total cost of the SWHE.

This work contains a versatile and low-cost analytical method to design and rating the SWHEs considering the variable fluid property with consistent shell geometry. The previous studies have introduced complex methods and have not considered the consistency of shell geometry.