Accurate prediction of thermal behavior and pseudo-boiling regions in high-pressure transcritical flows is critical for the design of advanced wall-bounded thermal management systems, ranging from aerospace propulsion to high-efficiency power cycles. However, high-fidelity three-dimensional (3D) scale-resolving simulations are often computationally prohibitive for design and optimization. This study introduces a physics-driven compute-efficient framework that leverages a quasi-3D low-fidelity model to accelerate the analysis of such flows. In this approach, the low-fidelity model is first utilized to predict wall temperature profiles and characterize the wall-normal topology of the pseudo-boiling region. These thermal distributions are subsequently used to inform 3D direct numerical simulations (DNS), streamlining the overall design process. The results demonstrate that the methodology accurately reproduces mean thermal distributions and bulk flow quantities across a wide range of operating pressures and wall thermal configurations. Specifically, the error in predicting the pseudo-boiling wall-normal location remains below 5%, while trends in the bulk Reynolds number are consistently captured. Although the low-fidelity model does not resolve shear-dependent turbulence statistics, it accurately predicts the position of the pseudo-boiling region and bulk flow parameters. This framework provides a robust, cost-effective tool for the preliminary design and optimization of high-pressure thermal systems, significantly reducing the reliance on conventional, resource-intensive DNS. • Low-fidelity model speeds up transcritical flow analysis by over 30x. • Truncated spanwise domain correctly captures bulk flow physics. • Pseudo-boiling wall normal location predicted with error below 5%.
Mansy et al. (Thu,) studied this question.
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