Considerations on Successful Similarity Theories Developed for Flow Stability and Heat Transfer with Fluids at Supercritical Pressure

This paper reports on a fluid-to-fluid scaling theory for fluids at supercritical pressures developed during the last decades at the University of Pisa. Moving from physical considerations and concepts borrowed from boiling channels analysis, basic dimensionless groups describing the relevant involved phenomena were identified. CFD analyses supported the capabilities in addressing flow stability and heat transfer problems of the adopted methodology that now achieved enough maturity to be tested against experimental data.