Implicit Model Equation for Hydraulic Resistance and Heat Transfer including Wall Roughness

Abstract

Heat transfer to water at supercritical pressure within the core of a supercritical water reactor must be predicted accurately to ensure safe design of the reactor and prevent overheating of the fuel cladding. In the previous work (Laurien, 2012, “SemiAnalytic Prediction of Hydraulic Resistance and Heat Transfer for Pipe Flows of Water at Supercritical Pressure,â€‌ Proceedings of the International Conference on Advances in Nuclear Power Plants, ICAPP’12, Chicago, June 24–28), we have demonstrated that the wall shear stress and the wall temperature can be computed in a coupled way by a finitedifference method, taking the wall roughness into account. In the present paper, the classical twolayer model, consisting only of a laminar sublayer and a turbulent wall layer, is extended toward the same task. A set of implicit algebraic equations for the wall shear stress and the wall temperature is derived. It is consistent with the wellestablished Colebrook equation for rough pipes, which is included as a limiting case for constant properties. The accuracy of the prediction for strongly heated pipe flow is tested by comparison to experiments (Yamagata et al., 1972, “Forced Convective Heat Transfer to Supercritical Water Flowing in Tubes,â€‌ Int. J. Heat Mass Transfer, 15(12), 2575–2593) with supercritical water. The high accuracy and the generality of Laurien (2012) “SemiAnalytic Prediction of Hydraulic Resistance and Heat Transfer for Pipe Flows of Water at Supercritical Pressure,â€‌ Proceedings of the International Conference on Advances in Nuclear Power Plants, ICAPP’12, Chicago, June 24–28 are not achieved, but with the help of correction factors, the twolayer model has a potential for improved predictions of the hydraulic resistance and the heat transfer of pipe and channel flows at supercritical pressure.