In the vicinity of the pseudocritical point, supercritical carbon dioxide (sCO₂) undergoes a steep change in properties from “liquid-like” to “gas-like” as it is heated at a constant pressure. At the same time, there is a large spike in specific heat which can yield high heat transfer coefficients and heat...
Waste-heat-recovery Organic Rankine Cycle (ORC) systems use excess heat from industrial processes to produce electrical power. In many cases, the temperatures and mass flow rates of these excess-heat streams vary significantly over time, causing the ORC to often operate far from its design point. In this study, a control strategy...
Large amounts of energy are wasted when conditioned air in buildings is exhausted to meet ventilation requirements. There are several technologies to recover some of this energy, including the recent development of membrane based energy recovery ventilators (ERVs). ERVs exchange sensible heat and moisture between incoming fresh and outgoing exhaust...
Concentrated solar power (CSP) plants have the potential to reduce the reliance on nonrenewable energies such as coal and natural gas and provide 24 hour, renewable electricity. A CSP system consists of a large field of heliostats that concentrate the sunlight on a centralized receiver, in this receiver a working...
With the continued decrease in size and subsequent increase in power of computer processors, thermal management in electronics is becoming more important than ever before. The chip heat densities are reaching new peaks (> 100 W cm-2) that current cooling methods are not able to keep up with. However, some...
Predicting condensation flow regimes and the associated heat transfer and pressure drop in microchannels is critical for designing terrestrial and space systems for heating, cooling, power generation, and advanced manufacturing. It is well established that in flows approaching the microscale (Dh < 1 mm) gravity-dominated flow regimes become less relevant,...
The advancement of new manufacturing techniques such as additive manufacturing enable significantly greater freedom of design compared to conventional techniques. Of significant interest is what improvements could be made in the design of cold plates and heat sinks for electronics cooling. Greater design freedom could potentially enable new designs that...
Seven decades of supercritical heat transfer research have not seen an attempt to characterize turbulent thermal transport in internal flows subject to asymmetric heating. Existing heat transfer models therefore do not account for phenomena that dictates thermal transport, in the proximity of the pseudo-critical point, for non-uniform heating. Additionally, past...