UROP Research Mentor Project Submission Portal: Submission #1005

Overall Research Project Description Heat is the enemy when operating a fuel tank containing liquid hydrogen. If not properly controlled, a fuel tank can pressurize and even explode due to evaporation (or boiling!). An additional bogeyman is that in microgravity, it can become unpredictable as to where the fuel is in the tank! In order to attempt to combat these problems, one must design a tank with appropriate placement of input nozzles (recooled fuel), liquid acquisition device (remove heated fuel), and baffles. Numerical simulations of the dynamics of the liquid hydrogen take an impractical long time if sub-scale models are not incorporated. This is a multiscale problem in which evaporation occurs on a time scale longer than the scale associated with sloshing dynamics. Because the tank size is on the scale of meters, the Reynolds' number is very large, which in turn influences the representative scales associated with heat convection. In this project, the UROP student will explore possible "fake parameter" solutions so that simulations can be run on a coarse mesh, but still have reasonable agreement with experiments.