CFD simulation platform for high-heat-flux turbulent supercritical CO2 flow

Copyright 2019: Mahdi Nabil, Alexander S Rattner

Multiscale Thermal Fluids and Energy (MTFE) Laboratory

The Pennsylvania State University

superCO2Thermo is an extensible open source volume-of-fluid (VOF) based simulation tool for studying convection heat transfer in high-heat-flux turbulent supercritical CO2 flow. The solver approach is based on the buoyantPimpleFoam and chtMultiRegionFoam codes developed by OpenCFD Ltd.. Target applications for superCO2Thermo include:

• Channel/pipe sCO2 flow
• Enhanced heat exchangers working with sCO2, e.g., pin-fins enhanced geometry, etc.

If you use this solver in a project or scholarly work, we ask that you include a citation for Nabil and Rattner (2019).

The current version of the code uses the OpenFOAM v1612+ libraries.

To Install: Navigate to a working folder in a shell terminal, clone the git code repository, and build.

$ git clone https://github.com/arattner1/superThermo
$ cd superThermo/superCO2Thermo
$ source Allwmake.sh

MTFE welcomes collaboration with other investigators studying supercritical flows. Please contact us if you are interested in expanding the solver or find bugs to correct. We can also provide limited support (on a case-by-case basis) or consulting servies.

This research was generously supported, in part, by the US National Science Foundation (NSF), and computing resources from NSF XSEDE.

• Nabil, M., Rattner, A.S., 2019. Large eddy simulations of high-heat-flux supercritical CO2 convection in microchannels: Mixed convection and non-uniform heating. International Journal of Heat and Mass Transfer 145: 118710. DOI: 10.1016/j.ijheatmasstransfer.2019.118710.