Research on correlations of friction factor of pipe flow under supercritical pressure

The determination of friction pressure drop of supercritical pipe flow is significant for the design, analysis and simulation of fluid machinery working. Many empirical correlations for supercritical friction factors have been proposed, and their prediction accuracy needs to be evaluated for application purpose. This paper provides an extensive survey of correlations and experiments of supercritical friction factors. There are 6 correlations for adiabatic condition and 11 correlations for non-isothermal condition. A database which contains 820 adiabatic data points and 459 non-isothermal data points was established. The correlations are assessed against the database. The results show that for adiabatic condition, the best correlation has a mean absolute deviation (MAD) of 20.4%, indicating a need to improve the prediction accuracy. For non-isothermal condition, the best correlation has an MAD of 17.4%. The correlations which can give the most accurate predictions for different fluids are also identified, providing a guide for selecting a proper correlation for a given application. (authors)