A new heat transfer correlation for supercritical water flowing in vertical tubes

Supercritical water has been used in many industrial fields, such as fossil-fired power plants and nuclear reactors, where the determination of heat transfer coefficients is required. Although many empirical correlations for heat transfer coefficients of supercritical water have been proposed, their prediction accuracy is not satisfactory, and thus more accurate correlations are needed. This paper proposes a new correlation for heat transfer of supercritical water flowing in vertical tubes based on 5366 experimental data points obtained from 13 independent papers. It has a mean absolute deviation (MAD) of 5.4% and predicts 95.7% of the entire database within +/- 15%, while the best existing correlation only has an MAD of 13.6% and predicts 64.4% of the database within 15%, which demonstrates that the new correlation is much better than any existing one. (c) 2014 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.