Abstract

Supercritical carbon dioxide jet impingement cooling is a topic of great current importance. Despite its rich genealogy—being related as it is to decades of jet impingement research utilizing more available fluids such as air and water—it suffers from the dearth of literature that afflicts all new trends in research. Motivated by the dependence of industry innovation on simulation tools, jet impingement with sCO2 is studied using RANS turbulence modeling to ascertain the reliability of these models as practical design guides as well as to explore potential avenues of future research. Benchmark cases using air are employed to develop a model with sCO2 that is as grounded in what is known as possible while still being relevant to the proposed topic of interest. Hydrodynamic and heat transfer characteristics are assessed for similarity between the two fluids. Once benchmarking is completed, the heat transfer distributions for sCO2 jet impingement are assessed according to their responses to varying magnitudes of Reynolds number, target surface temperature, inlet jet temperature, and exit pressure. All parametric studies implement values with close application relevance. The results for sCO2 align well with qualitative expectations and the validation cases with air exhibit moderate but acceptable error. It is concluded that RANS models are at least appropriate for guiding the design of jet impingement related technologies under the conditions of proper vetting and a realistic understanding of the typical degrees of error. Experimental work, however, ought to be the first priority moving forward as the heights of jet Reynolds numbers achievable with supercritical fluids have no benchmark in literature and as higher fidelity numerical methods such as LES and DNS, at this time, are not suitable for modeling such flows.

Notes

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Graduation Date

2020

Semester

Fall

Advisor

Kapat, Jayanta

Degree

Master of Science in Mechanical Engineering (M.S.M.E.)

College

College of Engineering and Computer Science

Department

Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering

Degree Program

Mechanical Engineering; Thermo-Fluids Track

Format

application/pdf

Identifier

CFE0008312; DP0023749

URL

https://purls.library.ucf.edu/go/DP0023749

Language

English

Release Date

December 2025

Length of Campus-only Access

5 years

Access Status

Masters Thesis (Campus-only Access)

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Restricted to the UCF community until December 2025; it will then be open access.

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