A Correlation for the Thermal Conductivity of Liquid Hydrocarbons and Aromatics

Thermal conductivity is necessary for most heat-transfer calculations or industrial equipments such as heat exchangers. Unfortunately, this property is an extremely difficult property to bemeasured due to some operational issues. Under these circumstances, increasingly number ofsuggested modeling’s, predictions, estimations or correlating methods for the thermal conductivity have been proposed during the past decades. In this direction, a four parameter correlation basedon the critical temperature (Tc), critical pressure (Pc) and acentric factor (ω) of substances,discriminating between the substances, was proposed. All of all, 954 experimental data point were collected from the different published literatures to find the fitting parameters of the correlation.In addition, to improve the extrapolative and general predictive ability of the proposed correlation,the collected data were dived in to two data sets namely, training and testing data sets. Theobtained results revealed that the four parameters including a,b, c, and d were 0.52,-0.342,1.362 and 8.58, respectively. Based on the error analysis, the propose correlation showed not only a good correlative capability but also showed a good extrapolative ability. Finally, the obtained results were compared to the other available predictive methods.

Keywords:

Correlation , Thermal Conductivity , Hydrocarbons , Aromatics , Critical Properties