NUMERICAL ANALYSIS OF SUPERCRITICAL WATER HEAT TRANSFER IN HORIZONTAL CIRCULAR TUBE

CANDU supercritical water reactor (SCWR) offers advantages in the areas of sustainability, economics, safety and reliability and proliferation resistance. However, there is still a big deficiency in understanding and prediction of heat transfer behaviour in supercritical fluids. In this paper, heat transfer is numerically investigated on supercritical water for three-dimensional horizontal flows. Three epsilon-type turbulence models are tested and the numerical results are compared with experimental data. Based on the result, the standard k-epsilon turbulence model with enhanced wall treatment is recommended. The effect of the buoyancy and heat transfer deterioration is also analyzed, and the criteria for onset of buoyancy effects is evaluated. The quantity Gr/Re(2.7) recommended by Jackson et al. (1975) gives a capacity to predict the buoyancy.