What is Compressed Fluid

Understanding the heat transfer characteristics of supercritical fluids is of fundamental importance in many industrial processes such as transcritical heat pump system, supercritical water-cooled reactor, supercritical separation, and supercritical extraction processes. This chapter addresses recent experimental, theoretical, and numerical studies on cooling heat transfer of supercritical CO2. A systematic study on heat transfer coefficient and pressure drop of supercritical CO2 was carried out at wide ranges of tube diameter, mass flux, heat flux, temperature, and pressure. Based on the understanding of temperature and velocity distributions at cross-sectional direction provided by the numerical simulation, a new prediction model was proposed, which agreed well with the experimental results. In addition, the effect of lubricating oil was also discussed with the focus on the change in flow pattern and heat transfer performance of oil and supercritical CO2.