Thermal Desktop Modeling of the 2016 CRYOTE-2 Tank Chill and Fill Tests

The storing and transfer of cryogenic propellants is an enabling technology for NASA as it moves to expand future missions into low Earth orbit (LEO) and beyond. The transfer of cryogenic propellants is of particular interest because it has never been successfully demonstrated in microgravity. Several ground tests have been conducted in past decades examining various tank chilldown and fill methods. Creating accurate models using these historical datasets is a vital step toward developing appropriate modeling tools to form pre-test predictions for eventual flight and ground tests of various novel injector concepts. The goal of this work was to create a working model in Thermal Desktop using data from the CRYOTE-2 experiments whose purpose was to demonstrate the chill and fill process in a spherical receiver tank parametrically examining the effect of injection method, receiver tank initial wall temperature and initial state, supply pressure, and mass flow rate on the NVF process. These tests were conducting using liquid nitrogen with different injectors with different injection patterns. The focus of the current work is on one particular spray nozzle. The pressure rise inside the tank, the fill level, and the change in the outside wall temperature were all tracked and compared with test data. The Thermal Desktop model was able to accurately predict each of these metrics for this nozzle within 11.0%, 22.0%, and 7.0%, respectively.