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Innovations in modeling cryogenic propellant phase change for long duration spaceflight.

Author(s) : SRIKANTH P.

Type of monograph: Doctoral thesis

Summary

Cryogenic propellants are going to be the cornerstone for effective future human space exploration. These propellants need to be stored and maintained at really low temperatures for a long duration. Accurate phase change modeling is necessary for characterizing the thermal state of future cryogenic propellant tanks and for designing systems to alleviate the self pressurization problem. Better understanding about how to properly store and manage cryogenic propellants would help greatly with In-Situ Resource Utilization (ISRU) strategies for future missions to Mars and further. Predicting the fluid flow, heat transfer, and phase change mass transfer in long term cryogenic storage using CFD models is greatly affected by our understanding of the accommodation coefficient. The kinetically limited phase change model governed by the Hertz-Knudsen-Schrage equation is the model of choice for such calculations. The value of the accommodation coefficient required for the model is unknown for cryogenic propellants. Even in the case of water, the value of the accommodation coefficient has been found to vary over three orders of magnitude based on 80 years of measurements. Experiments specifically built to study accommodation coefficient are needed to estimate the value of the accommodation coefficient and understand some of the uncertainties surrounding these models.


Two phase change models, viz. the thermally limited and the kinetically limited phase change model are implemented in OpenFOAM. Different approaches to implement the Hertz-Knudsen-Schrage equation in a sharp interface conjugate heat transfer solver are studied. Evaporation and condensation calculations for a liquid hydrogen meniscus inside an aluminum container are compared with experimental measurements. The effect of accommodation coefficient on phase change is then studied with the kinetically limited model by comparing with the thermally limited model and the experimental measurements. The uncertainties associated with the temperature and pressure measurements in the experiment are quantified to show their effect on computational predictions. Since cryogenic propellants are perfectly wetting fluids, modeling the thin-film region close to the contact line leads to a multi-scale computational problem. However, the phase change contribution from the thin-film region is approximated in these computations to show the importance of modeling the contact line region accurately to adequately capture the small local thermodynamics in that region.

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Pages: 86 p.

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