Closed-loop Brayton cycles using supercritical carbon dioxide (SCO2) show potential for use in high-temperature power generation applications including High Temperature Gas Reactors (HTGR) and Sodium-Cooled Fast Reactors (SFR). Compared to Rankine cycles SCO2 Brayton cycles offer similar or improved efficiency and the potential for decreased capital costs due to a reduction in equipment size and complexity. Compact printed-circuit heat exchangers (PCHE) are being considered as part of several SCO2 Brayton designs to further reduce equipment size with increased energy density. Several designs plan to use a gas cooler operating near the pseudo-critical point of carbon dioxide to benefit from large variations in thermo-physical properties, but further work is needed to validate correlations for heat transfer and pressure-drop characteristics of SCO2 flows in candidate PCHE channel designs for a variety of operating conditions. This paper presents work on experimental measurements of the heat transfer and pressure drop behavior of miniature channels using carbon dioxide at supercritical pressure. Results from several plate geometries tested in horizontal cooling-mode flow are presented, including a straight semi-circular channel, zig-zag channel with a bend angle of 80 degrees, and a channel with a staggered array of extruded airfoil pillars modeled after a NACA 0020 airfoil with an 8.1 mm chord length facing into the flow. Heat transfer coefficients and bulk temperatures are calculated from measured local wall temperatures and local heat fluxes. The experimental results are compared to several methods for estimating the friction factor and Nusselt number of cooling-mode flows at supercritical pressures in millimeter-scale channels.
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