Experimental investigation of thermodynamic instability of supercritical endothermic hydrocarbon fuel within a small-scale channel

Abstract

A series of experiments were performed to investigate the thermodynamic instabilities that occur during heating of supercritical endothermic hydrocarbon fuel. A “power–temperature drop” characteristic curve is used to analyze the mechanism of thermodynamic instabilities. The results indicate that the heat-transfer process in a heated tube with increasing heating power can be divided into three periods: stable, developing, and instable; in which, the thermodynamic instabilities are found to occur. When the outlet fuel temperature reaches the pseudo-critical temperature, an acute decrease in fuel density and viscosity causes the flow to change from a transition flow to a turbulent flow, and the sharp increase of heat transfer in turbulent flow increases the thermodynamic instabilities. The intensity of the instability is related to the kinetic energy of the flow and the oscillatory extent. When the mass flow rate is increased from 1.0 to 1.5 g/s, the effect on the flow’s kinetic energy dominates the change in instability which causes the intensity of the instability to increase. While the intensity of the instability decreases with increasing inlet fuel temperature, which results from the decrease of the oscillatory extent. The effects of the operating pressure on the instability are not linear because of the properties of fuel change, obviously with pressure near the critical point.