Supercritical flow experimental facility

In the present work, a supercritical flow experimental facility was designed and constructed to understand the behavior of supercritical fluid flow. The primary objective of the experimental facility is to study the supercritical flow instabilities in fluids, while the experimental facility can be employed to conduct other studies, such as heat transfer and pressure drop characteristics. The experimental facility was designed for supercritical water as the working fluid. Most of the components required for water were procured. However, as the first phase of study will use carbon dioxide at supercritical conditions, some components installed are specific to carbon dioxide and will be replaced for the water experiments. The facility was completely constructed and assembled as per design. Pre-experimental procedures such as chemical cleaning and leak tests were performed. Pressure testing was also conducted to verify the pressure rating (10 MPa) of the facility for carbon dioxide experiments.;Steady-state numerical simulations of the loop with carbon dioxide flowing in a single channel distributed heat system were conducted using modified SPORTS code. About sixty simulations were conducted for varying parameters, such as channel inlet K-factor, channel outlet K-factor, inlet temperature and pressure.