Buoyancy effects on heat transfer to supercritical pressure hydrocarbon fuel in a horizontal miniature tube

Experimental investigations on heat transfer of supercritical pressure aviation hydrocarbon fuel RP-3 in a horizontal miniature round tube were conducted. The influence of buoyancy on heat transfer of RP-3 was studied. Buoyancy effect is particularly significant in horizontal flows, which leads to non-uniform temperature distributions in cross section of the test section even for the miniature round tube. The buoyancy effects of heat transfer can be well evaluated by the non-dimensional parameter Gr_q/Gr_th developed by Petukhov. And this criterion was first tested for the horizontal flow in miniature round tube under supercritical pressure conditions. At last, this paper proposed a correlation of Nusselt number for supercritical pressure aviation fuel in the horizontal tube.