Modelling of Liquid Hydrogen No-Vent-Fill Tests Using Thermal Desktop

Efficient cryogenic propellant transfer is important to the success of upcoming NASA missions to the Moon and Mars. The no-vent-fill method is a promising approach that allows for simple low-loss propellant transfers over a wide range of ambient thermal and acceleration conditions. This approach has been previously studied in 3 separate experiments at NASA Glenn Research Center using liquid hydrogen in tanks ranging in volume from 34 to 5000 liters. Thermal/fluid models of the test subject tanks and supporting experimental hardware are developed using a Thermal Desktop twin-tank compartment approach. A key feature of the modelling is to replace the Thermal Desktop default values of liquid-vapor heat transfer coefficients with correlations from literature better chosen to match the fluid dynamics and phase change thermodynamics occurring in the tests. Details of the modelling effort and comparisons of model predictions to the NASA test datasets are presented and discussed.