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This thesis addresses some important issues when designing microfluidic systems for hot pressurized water. The properties and behavior of water at elevated temperatures and in micro scale is briefly reviewed, and opportunities and possible problems of using hot pressurized water in microfluidic devices are brought up. Experimental work was focused on corrosion resistance for commonly used microsystem materials in hot pressurized water, and the microfluidic behavior for hot pressurized water. An experiment system was successfully designed, assembled and used for corrosion resistance experiments in hot pressurized water. Corrosion resistance tests were performed for some common materials used in microfluidic and microsystems (silicon, stainless steel grade 304, silicon carbide, aluminum nitride, aluminum oxide, soda-lime glass and borosilicate glass) in deionized water and in low concentration HCl (0.1 mM) at two different temperatures (180oC and 270oC). All of the tested materials, except soda-lime glass, showed a good overall performance in the low temperature range. In the high temperature range, all materials showed signs of corrosion to some extent. Severe damages and high corrosion rates were observed for silicon and the two glasses, and stainless steel 304 showed signs of pitting corrosion. A microfluidic study identified some major issues needed to be overcome to make future microfluidic studies with hot pressurized water possible. Important observations included the importance of a short traveling distance for a hot micro flow to avoid rapid cooling, and to choose a suitable dye to avoid particles clogging thin capillaries and micro channels.

Climate change is becoming more severe than ever in human history and the emission of green house gas urgently needs to be reduced while global energy consumption remains booming. Large-scale application of clean fossil fuel combustion shall be considered as a priority for its economical advantages as well as reliability in meeting global energy needs. Oxygen-fired pressurized fluidized bed combustor technology with downstream carbon capture and sequestration is considered a key approach to clean coal combustion. In such technology, the fluidized bed combustor operates at elevated pressures and houses an in-bed heat exchanger tube bundle. It is essential to understand the rate of heat transfer between the immersed heat exchange surface and the fluidized bed as it is a key parameter in heat exchanger design. The goal of this work was to investigate the impact of pressure and presence of fine particles (i.e., surrogate for pulverized fuel) on the overall tube-to-bed heat transfer coefficient. Experiments were conducted in a pilot-scale fluidized bed with an inner diameter of 0.15 m under cold flow conditions. A tube bundle consisting of five horizontal staggered rows was completely submerged in the bed. One of the tubes was replaced by a heating cartridge housed in a hollowed copper rod. Five thermocouples distributed at 45º intervals along the copper rod circumference measured the surface temperature and ensured that local effects were included. The bed material was large glass beads of 1.0 mm in diameter while the fines were glass beads of 60 µm in diameter and thus susceptible to entrainment. The fine particles were continuously fed to the fluidized bed and then captured downstream by a filter system. Fluidization was conducted at 101, 600 and 1200 kPa with excess gas velocities (Ug - Umf) of 0.21, 0.29 and 0.51 m/s. Fine particle feed rates were 0, 9.5 and 14.4 kg/h. Two heating rod positions (2nd row and 4th row) were studies. Overall, the heat transfer coefficient approximately doubled when pressure was increased from 101 to 1200 kPa. At atmospheric conditions, where the slug flow regime occurred, the maximum heat transfer coefficient was at the bottom of the rod, while it moved to the side of the rod at high pressures where the bubbling regime occurred. As the heating rod moving from 2nd row to the 4th row, the averaged heat transfer coefficient increased by respectively 18%, 9% and 6% at 101, 600 and 1200 kPa. The addition of fine particles decreased the average heat transfer coefficient by 10 to 20 W/m2 K where the time – averaged heat transfer coefficient was approximately 220 and 450 W/m2K at 101 kPa and 1200 kPa respectively. There was no effect on the angular profile across the tube surface. The results showed that average heat transfer coefficients matched the correlation developed by Molerus et al. (1995) within a 5% difference across all conditions when fines were not present.

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