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Using supercritical CO2 as a heat transfer fluid in microchannel receivers is a promising alternative for tower concentrating solar power plants. In this paper, the heat transfer and flow characteristics of supercritical CO2 in microchannels at high temperature are investigated by numerical simulations. The effects of microchannel structure, mass flow rate, heat flux, pressure, inlet temperature and radiation are analyzed and discussed. The results show that higher mass flow rate obtains poorer heat transfer performance with larger flow resistance of supercritical CO2 in microchannels at high temperature. The fluid and wall temperatures, average heat transfer coefficient and pressure drop all increase nearly linearly with the increases in heat flux and inlet temperature in the high-temperature region. Moreover, high pressure contributes to great hydraulic performance with approximate thermal performance. The effect of radiation on thermal performance is more pronounced than that on hydraulic performance. Furthermore, the optimized structures of inlet and outlet headers, as well as those of the multichannel in the microchannels, are proposed to obtain good temperature uniformity in the microchannels with relatively low pressure drop. The results given in the current study can be conducive to the design and application of microchannel receivers with supercritical CO2 as a heat transfer fluid in the third generation of concentrating solar power plants. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Methane (R50) and ethane (R170) are the dominated components of natural gas and the important components in mixture refrigerants for the mixture Joule–Thomson refrigeration cycle. In this article, experimental investigations on nucleate pool boiling and flow boiling heat transfer characteristics of R50, R170, and their binary mixtures are presented. The effects of saturation pressure, heat flux, mass flux, concentration, and vapor quality on heat transfer coefficients are analyzed and discussed. Firstly, the pool boiling heat transfer data were compared with six well-known correlations. Labuntsov correlation shows the best agreement with a mean absolute relative deviation (MARD) of 11.3%. Secondly, a new flow boiling heat transfer correlation for pure fluids was proposed based on the asymptotic addition of forced convection and pool boiling. The modified enhancement factor and suppression factor were developed to account for their relative contribution. In addition, in order to consider the mass transfer resistance of mixtures, a new mixture factor was deduced. The new flow boiling heat transfer correlations can well predict the experimental data with the MARD of 9.5% for pure fluids and 8.3% for mixtures. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]