EXTENDING A FLUID-TO-FLUID SIMILARITY RATIONALE FOR HEAT TRANSFER AT SUPERCRITICAL PRESSURE TO R134a

In the frame of the development of Gen-IV supercritical water reactors (SCWRs), making use of the experimental data collected so far by different fluids in view of simulating the behavior of water is an important and very useful step. However, conducting experiments with simulant fluids poses the problem of establishing a clear rationale for inferring the expected water behavior from the information gathered with other fluids. In literature, several attempts have been made to suggest dimensionless groups to be preserved in establishing a similarity. However, difficulties were encountered in getting appreciable success from these attempts and relevant reviews declared a generally unsatisfactory behavior of available theories. Recently, some of the authors of this paper were able to demonstrate the good success of their proposal for a fluid-to-fluid similarity theory addressing mainly four relevant fluids being water, carbon dioxide, ammonia and R23. In the frame of the EU ECC-Smart Project, the refrigerant R134a will be used as a simulant fluid for performing experimental analyses in support to the achievement of the project objectives. Hence, the present paper is aimed to show the capabilities of the similarity theory when applied to R134a, proposing a rationale to be used in selecting the boundary conditions of experiments in order to make them really representative of the addressed water plant conditions.