2016 Volume 64 Issue 4 Pages 215-222
Predicting heat transfer of cooling channels in liquid rocket engines is crucial to the design of them. As computational power has been improved, computational fluid dynamics (CFD) is considered to become an effective approach to achieve accurate predictions of heat transfer in cooling channels. To predict it, real gas effects under supercritical conditions should be taken into account but how physical properties variations of supercritical fluids affect turbulent flow fields is not clarified. Therefore, it is also not clarified whether existing turbulent models can be applied to such flow fields. To investigate those things, a current study conducted direct numerical simulations in a fully developed channel flow submitted to a temperature gradient under plural supercritical conditions. Results show that mean temperature and turbulent heat flux profiles do not match each other but there is no large difference in Reynolds stress and turbulent Prandtl number profiles. Those results indicate that the physical properties variation under supercritical conditions hardly affect turbulent characteritics.