Experimental Data of Supercritical Carbon Dioxide (sCO2) Compressor at Various Fluid States

Abstract

This paper presents experimental data on a centrifugal compressor operated with CO2. Temperature and pressure at the inlet of the compressor are varied to cover the supercritical region from the liquid-like to the gas-like region. In addition, inlet conditions in the two-phase region are also included. Thus, the experimental test campaign considers thermodynamic conditions relevant for the future energy conversion with sCO2-Joule cycles. Experimental results are presented as compressor pressure ratio versus inlet mass flow rate at different rotational speeds and throttle positions. Reliable conclusions can be drawn from the experimental results since the reproducibility of the measurements has been demonstrated by conducting experiments in two different test rigs, and measurement uncertainties are reported. The entire compressor geometry is disclosed in a data repository, including computer-aided design models, and input files suitable for mean-line and grid generation programs. Thus, the experimental results are exploitable by the scientific community and pave the road for validated analysis and design tools in the context of the sCO2-Joule cycle. The presented results open the possibility to estimate uncertainties of analysis and design tools with little effort since geometry information can be quickly integrated. The experimental data are already used in this paper to obtain the accuracy of a computational fluid dynamics (CFD) code and a mean-line program for sCO2. In addition to quantifying uncertainties, the results presented can be used to identify shortcomings of existing tools. This can be an essential step in the exploration of the sCO2-Joule cycle.