The challenge of global warming caused by the emission of greenhouse gases has led to the desire for mitigating climate change by exploring the use of alternative sources of energy to reduce the use of traditional fossil fuels. In this context, supercritical fluids play an important role due to their use in various technologies and processes that promote sustainable development. These fluids possess a unique combination of gas-like and liquid-like properties enabling their usage in supercritical power cycles, which are more efficient compared to other methods of energy conversion. In this thesis, we investigate turbulent flows of supercritical CO2 near the vapourliquid critical point in a channel geometry by solving the fully compressible Navier Stokes equations. The purpose of the investigation is to gain a better understanding of the physics of turbulent supercritical fluid flows near the critical point by taking the compressibility effects into account.

This work investigates fully developed turbulent flows of carbon-dioxide close to its vapour-liquid critical point in a channel with a hot and a cold wall. Two direct numerical simulations are performed at low Mach numbers, with the trans-critical transition near the channel centre and the cold wall, respectively. An additional simulation with constant transport properties is used to selectively investigate the effect of the non-linear equation of state on turbulence. Compared to the case where the pseudo-critical transition occurs in the channel center, the case with the pseudo-critical transition close to the cold wall reveals that compressibility effects can exist in the near-wall region even at low Mach numbers. An analysis of the velocity streaks near the hot and the cold walls also indicates a greater degree of streak coherence near the cold wall. A comparison between the constant and variable viscosity cases at the same Reynolds number, Mach number and having the same isothermal wall boundary conditions reveals that variable viscosity increases turbulence near the cold wall and also causes higher velocity gradients near the hot wall. We also show that the extended van Driest transformation results in a better agreement of the velocity profile with the log-law of the wall compared to the standard van Driest transformation. The semi-locally scaled turbulent velocity fluctuations and the turbulent kinetic energy budgets on the hot and the cold sides of the channel collapse on top of each other, thereby establishing the validity of Morkovin’s hypothesis.