Free convective heat transfer to supercritical carbon dioxide

Experiments on free convective heat transfer from electrically heated platinum wires and a platinum strip to supercritical carbon dioxide were performed for a wide range of bulk conditions. It is shown that heat transfer can be predicted by a conventional Nusselt-type correlation if the dimensionless numbers are based on integrated thermophysical properties in order to account for large changes in these properties. The anomaly of thermal conductivity has to be considered. Agreement between the experimental results and the correlation is within 10 percent even for very thin wires when for those a correction factor is introduced.