Measurements of Density and Sound Speed in Mixtures Relevant to sCO2 Power Cycles

Abstract The objective of this research is to validate properties of mixtures relevant to supercritical carbon dioxide (sCO2) power cycles. Direct fired sCO2 cycles are promising technology for the future power generation systems. The working fluid of sCO2 cycles will be near and above critical point of CO2. One of the challenges is that the simulation of mixtures should consider real gas behavior. Expected operating conditions of Allam cycles reach up to 300 bar and 1000 °C. Characterizing the mixtures at the extreme conditions is an important issue in current researches and industrial applications. Thermophysical properties of mixtures may be beyond the valid range of the widely used database such as NIST REFPROP. Experimental data of mixtures properties in the literature is limited which is necessary to develop high-fidelity design tools for sCO2 power cycles. We measured density and sound speed of several multi-component mixtures. A temperature-controlled high-pressure test cell was used for the density measurements. Sound speed was measured by resonant frequency detection using an external speaker and a piezoelectric pressure sensor. Mixtures studied in this work includes carbon dioxide, methane, oxygen and water vapor. Properties of pure CO2 were measured to show the validity of our technique. Compositions were selected to be close to frozen mixtures at the inlet, mid-progress and exhaust conditions of a model sCO2 combustor in the previous numerical simulation work. Corresponding reaction progress variables (RPV) were RPV = 0, 0.5, and 1. Temperature and pressure conditions of experiments are 310–450 K, and 0–150 bar. In our study, density and sound speed from NIST REFPROP database agree with experimental measurements within the range of our measurement uncertainties.