Thermal and hydraulic performance of SCO2 PCHE with different fin configurations

The numerical study of thermal and hydraulic performance of a supercritical CO2 (SCO2) printed circuit heat exchanger (PCHE) has been conducted and validated using published experimental data. A domain optimization study has been carried out to finalize a PCHE domain with significantly reduced computational time without compromising the accuracy of the solution. The optimized domain was used to evaluate the thermal and hydraulic performance of the heat exchanger with a wide range of Reynolds numbers and different geometrical configurations. In contrast to subcritical region, thermophysical properties of CO2 undergo sharp variations close to the critical point. In order to capture the swift variation in thermophysical properties of CO2 and to ensure accurate prediction of thermal and hydraulic performance of heat exchanger, properties of SCO2 were computed using REFPROP. MATLAB was linked through a script to REFPROP and high-resolution real gas property (RGP) file was generated and supplied to a commercial code ANSYS-CFX for numerical simulations.