Thermal Conductivity Measurements of Liquid Ethylene and Ethylene plus Propane Binary Mixtures

Ethylene and its mixtures play an important role in fields such as cryogenic refrigeration and chemical separation. However, there is a lack of experimental data on the thermal conductivity of ethylene and its mixtures at low temperatures. In this work, the thermal conductivity of liquid ethylene and ethylene + propane mixtures was measured using the transient hot-wire method. For ethylene, measurements were conducted within the temperature range 120-240 K, with pressures below 22 MPa. For ethylene + propane mixtures, with ethylene mole fractions of 0.306, 0.437, and 0.706, the measurements were conducted within a temperature range of 133-268 K, with pressures below 23 MPa. The experimental results deviated from REFPROP 10.0 calculation results by no more than 3%, where ethylene uses a proprietary model and binary mixtures use the ECS model. The experimental data for ethylene were correlated based on dimensional analysis, resulting in an average absolute relative deviation (AARD) of 0.85%. The thermal conductivity of the ethylene + propane mixtures was developed by combining the critical parameter prediction model and dimensional analysis method, yielding an AARD of 0.98%. The results indicate that the correlation model exhibits a higher accuracy than the models implemented into REFPROP 10.0.