Modeling and analysis of heat and mass transfers of supercritical hydrocarbon fuel with pyrolysis in mini-channel

A 2D numerical model was established with unstructured mesh using Time-marching algorithms with preconditioning to investigate the heat and mass transfer of supercritical hydrocarbon fuel with pyrolysis in mini-channel. The three-parameter RK-PR EoS, which is the unified form of SRK and PR EoS, was used to describe the thermophysical properties of cracked fuel mixture including small and large hydrocarbon molecules. Then, Numerical tests indicated that the present numerical model was able to predict the variation of the supercritical reaction flow field with small velocity effectively. Then, the numerical model was employed to study the coupling relationships and interaction mechanisms of flow, heat transfer and pyrolysis in the chemical reaction flow field, and it was found that there was a chemical reaction boundary in addition to velocity and temperature boundary layers in the chemical reaction flow field. And the gradients of velocity and temperature in the flow direction increased and decreased respectively under the influence of pyrolysis. The chemical heat sink exhibited non-uniformity in the cross-section of channel. But, the non-uniformity of chemical heat sink decreased due to heat and mass transfers in the radial.