Heat Transfer Correlations for Complete Cryogenic Pool Boiling Curve

The proposed effort concerns technologies related to cryogenic propellant production, storage, transfer, and usage to support NASA’s in-situ resource utilization (ISRU) goals. They include a broad range of applications, scales, and environments consistent with future NASA missions to the Moon and Mars. More specifically, this project will address development of a piecewise-smooth set of correlations for use in lumped node codes to facilitate prediction of the entire cryogenic pool boiling curve (local wall heat flux versus wall-to-fluid temperature difference) encountered in cryogenic storage and transfer systems. For the Phase I study, focus will be placed on developing a model for critical heat flux (CHF) for both quenching and heating configurations, which will be validated against databases for LHe, LH2, Ar, LN2, LO2, and LCH4.

The proposed effort concerns technologies related to cryogenic propellant production, storage, transfer, and usage to support NASA’s in-situ resource utilization (ISRU) goals. They include a broad range of applications, scales, and environments consistent with future NASA missions to the Moon and Mars.

Pool boiling is a viable cooling solution for numerous applications, including data centers, hybrid vehicle electronics, and aircraft avionics, Developing a piecewise-smooth set of correlations for use in lumped node codes to facilitate prediction of the entire pool boiling curve is of paramount importance not only to space cryogenic applications, but to these non-NASA applications as well.

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