Numerical Studies on Direct Contact Condensation (DCC) of Subsonic Vapor/Gas Jets in Subcooled Flowing Liquid

摘要

In a typical gas turbine driven LOX booster pump for rocket engine applications, the turbine can be run by either the GOX after cooling the nozzle section or by the oxidiser rich combustion products from the preburner depending upon the engine specifications. For stage combustion cycle based rocket engines, a typical configuration is that the turbine drive gases mix with LOX at the pump exit in order to convert entire GOX to LOX as process fluid for the main pump. This process of heat transfer is a phenomena called Direct Contact Condensation (DCC). Although works on steam-water direct contact condensation are available extensively in the open literature, there are no reported works on the development of direct contact condenser operating at cryogenic temperatures and hence, the aim of this paper is to numerically investigate this phenomena for understanding the design of these condensers. A two fluid Eulerian multiphase formulation has been adopted to examine the DCC phenomena of subsonic vapor/gas jets in subcooled flowing liquid. A thermal phase change model has been adopted for evaluating the condensation effects. The numerical model thus developed has been validated with the experimental results on steam-water DCC available in the literature. With the help of dimensional analysis, similar configurations has been studied for GOX-LOX mixtures and a comparison between steam-water and GOX-LOX DCC has been carried out.