Computational Fluid Dynamics of a Radial Compressor Operating With Supercritical CO₂

The merit of using supercritical $CO2(scCO2)$ as the working fluid of a closed Brayton cycle gas turbine is now widely recognized, and the development of this technology is now actively pursued. $scCO2$ gas turbine power plants are an attractive option for solar, geothermal, and nuclear energy conversion. Among the challenges that must be overcome in order to successfully bring the technology to the market is that the efficiency of the compressor and turbine operating with the supercritical fluid should be increased as much as possible. High efficiency can be reached by means of sophisticated aerodynamic design, which, compared to other overall efficiency improvements, like cycle maximum pressure and temperature increase, or increase of recuperator effectiveness, does not require an increase in equipment cost, but only an additional effort in research and development. This paper reports a three-dimensional computational fluid dynamics (CFD) study of a high-speed centrifugal compressor operating with CO₂ in the thermodynamic region slightly above the vapor–liquid critical point. The investigated geometry is the compressor impeller tested in the Sandia $scCO2$ compression loop facility. The fluid dynamic simulations are performed with a fully implicit parallel Reynolds-averaged Navier–Stokes code based on a finite volume formulation on arbitrary polyhedral mesh elements. In order to account for the strongly nonlinear variation of the thermophysical properties of supercritical CO₂, the CFD code is coupled with an extensive library for the computation of properties of fluids and mixtures. A specialized look-up table approach and a meshing technique suited for turbomachinery geometries are also among the novelties introduced in the developed methodology. A detailed evaluation of the CFD results highlights the challenges of numerical studies aimed at the simulation of technically relevant compressible flows occurring close to the liquid–vapor critical point. The data of the obtained flow field are used for a comparison with experiments performed at the Sandia $scCO2$ compression-loop facility.