Experimental Study of Miscible and Immiscible Oil Effects on Heat Transfer Coefficients and Pressure Drop in Microchannel Gas Cooling of Supercritical CO₂

Carbon Dioxide (CO2) is being investigated as an alternative refrigerant for vapor compression systems. In addition to its environmental benefits, Carbon Dioxide offers certain attractive thermal characteristics such as small surface tension, small liquid viscosity and large refrigerant capacity. Furthermore, combination with microchannels provides CO2 heat exchangers that have low weight, high compaction and high heat transfer coefficient. But certain oil (e.g., lubricate oil for compressor) will be carried into the vapor compression system, which usually has negative effect on heat transfer and pressure drop. The objective of the present paper is to study the effect of oil addition on heat transfer coefficient and pressure drop in supercritical gas cooling process in microchannels. Experiments addressed effect of three different types of oil (two immiscible and one miscible) at various oil concentrations ranging from 0% (no oil) to 5% by weight. As expected, oil addition has significant negative effect on heat transfer coefficients. At higher oil concentrations the heat transfer coefficients are substantially lower and the pressure drops are higher. As far the type of oil is concerned, the immiscible oil demonstrated more negative influence on the heat transfer and pressure drops than the miscible oil.