Thermal Conductivity Measurements of Liquid Ethylene and Ethylene + 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.