STS-4 Heat Transfer in Liquid Metals

L. Huang, K. J. Farrell

2025

Most experimental and numerical investigations on heat transfer in liquid metals with Pr < 0.1 concern tubeside flow, but a select few focus on shellside flow. This report reviews and compares single-phase heat transfer correlations for liquid metals in turbulent flow. It demonstrates that different sets of correlations should be used for liquid metals. Computational fluid dynamics (CFD) simulations of tubeside flow confirmed a much lower heat transfer coefficient compared to the one predicted by the current HTRI turbulent correlation for Pr > 0.5. Based on our evaluations, we plan to implement a set of correlations for liquid metals with a proration into our current single-phase method in our software.