Fast heat transfer calculations in supercritical fluids versus hydrodynamic approach

TL;DR

This paper introduces an efficient thermodynamic-based numerical method for predicting heat transfer in supercritical fluids, demonstrating significant computational savings while maintaining accuracy compared to full hydrodynamic simulations.

Contribution

A novel simplified thermodynamic approach for heat transfer prediction in supercritical fluids that matches detailed hydrodynamic results with much less computation.

Findings

The method agrees well with Navier-Stokes simulations.

It offers substantial reduction in computation time.

The approach is validated for CO2 and SF6.

Abstract

This study investigates the heat transfer in a simple pure fluid whose temperature is slightly above its critical temperature. We propose a efficient numerical method to predict the heat transfer in such fluids when the gravity can be neglected. The method, based on a simplified thermodynamic approach, is compared with direct numerical simulations of the Navier-Stokes and energy equations performed for CO2 and SF6. A realistic equation of state is used to describe both fluids. The proposed method agrees with the full hydrodynamic solution and provides a huge gain in computation time. The connection between the purely thermodynamic and hydrodynamic descriptions is also discussed.