Multiphase Phenomena In Thermal Management Systems

The advancement of aeropropulsion technologies has placed increasing demand on the structural and thermal capabilities of high speed aeroengines. Though hydrocarbon fuels have been used as cooling media in jet aircraft engines for several years, advanced flight vehicles are reaching a practical heat transfer limit beyond which the sensible heat transfer provided by conventional fuels is no longer adequate. One solution is to use endothermic fuels that absorb heat during chemical reactions. At the temperatures and pressures likely to be encountered in the thermal management system of high speed aircraft and rockets, the cooling medium will become supercritical in addition to undergoing thermal cracking and pyrolysis reaction. Advanced computational fluid dynamic models coupled with fuel degradation chemistry and advanced high temperature and pressure fuel component simulators are required to simulate the impact of fuel degradation in high speed aircraft cooling systems. This proposal involves the development a design tool for predicting the thermal stability of hydrocarbon fuels used in the cooling loops of high speed aircrafts, rockets and SCRAMJETs. BENEFIT: An important product from this project will be the development of a robust tool to be used in optimizing the design of thermal management for military and commercial flight vehicles.  This product will give the design engineer much more freedom to test new designs operating with different fuels at wider range of operating temperatures and pressures.   The market for this product will include gas turbine designers and manufacturers for both military and civilian aircraft as well as designers or rocket and SCRAMJET thermal management systems. The use of this tool will significantly reduce development costs by eliminating some design iterations and hardware testing, which is quite expensive and time-consuming.