Numerical Investigations on Supercritical Heat Transfer Characteristics of Environmental Friendly Refrigerants

The heat transfer of supercritical fluids is a vastly growing field, specifically to find suitable alternatives to replace conventional R134a, which can be beneficial for climate change. Most of the experimental and numerical investigations have been conducted to explore supercritical water, carbon dioxide and R134a as heat transfer working fluids. Hydrofluoroolefin (HFO) and refrigerants blends have been considered the most environment-friendly refrigerants to replace Chlorofluorocarbons (CFCs), Hydrochlorofluoro-carbons (HCFCs) and Hydrofluorocarbons (HFCs). Their main advantage of zero Ozone Depletion Potential (ODP) and comparatively lower Global Warming Potential (GWP) have attracted growing amount of attention to mitigate environmental issues. This work adopts the computational method and takes the environmentally friendly refrigerants to investigate the heat transfer characteristics under widely used shear-stress transport (SST) model. A comprehensive comparison was performed at reduced pressure of 1.10 for supercritical fluids R515A, R1234ze(E) and R134a. The peaks of heat transfer coefficient occurred in the vicinity of pseudo critical temperature for all of these considered fluids;however, R134a resulted in higher heat transfer coefficient, Reynolds number and Prandtl number in comparison with R515A and R1234ze(E). The higher heat transfer coefficient of supercritical fluid R134a is owing to its thermophysical properties and the specific heat plays crucial role in the heat transfer of supercritical fluids. Owing to environmental issues, R515A can be a considerable replacement of R134a. R1234ze(E) is also promising alternative to R134a;however, safety issues should thoroughly concern its mild flammable characteristics.

Thermophysical Properties and Supercritical Heat Transfer Characteristics of R515A

The heat transfer of supercritical fluids is a vastly growing field, specifically to find suitable alternative to replace conventional R134a, which can be beneficial for climate change. A considerable suggestion is R515A which possesses considerably lower global warming potential. The present simulations are designed to study supercritical fluid R515A under cooling conditions in horizontal position. The effect of pressure, mass flux, heat flux and tube diameter were considered for horizontal tube in the vicinity of pseudo critical temperature. Numerical investigations on heat transfer characteristics of supercritical fluid R515A were performed using widely used shear-stress transport (SST) model. Moreover, heat transfer correlations were developed and suggested to accurately predict Nusselt number within 10% accuracy. The simulation results showed about 3.98% average absolute deviation.