Thermo-Fluid Analysis and Evaluation Test in Propellant Tank for Rocket Propellant System

Numerical simulation tool based on commercialized code STAR-CD was developed to analyze thermo-fluid behavior in liquid storage tank for liquid rocket propulsion system. In this tool, liquid and gas phase were separately calculated since two phase flow calculation usually requires enormous CPU power to obtain solution for reasonable time. This paper describes thermo-fluid behavior in gas phase. Experiment by using subscale tank and LN2 as a simulated liquid was conducted for the purpose of evaluating results by numerical calculations. It was shown that history of temperature distributions in gas phase and solid walls agreed well with experimental ones. In addition of this, accumulated consumed mass of gas helium could be estimated through this simulation tool within about 2% difference from measured value.