Review on active thermal protection and its heat transfer for airbreathing hypersonic vehicles

Hypersonic vehicles with turbojet, ramjet, and scramjet engines are expected to be widely applied to future transportation systems. Due to high-speed flight in the atmosphere, body outer surfaces suffer strong aerodynamic heating, and on the other hand, combustion chamber inter walls are under extremely high temperature and heat flux. Therefore, more efficient and stable active cooling technologies are required in hypersonic vehicles, such as regenerative cooling, film cooling, and transpiration cooling, as well as their combinations. This paper presents a comprehensive literature review on three active cooling methods, i.e., regenerative cooling, film cooling, and transpiration cooling, and deeply analyzes the mechanism of each cooling method, including the fluids flow, heat transfer, and thermal cracking characteristics of different hydrocarbon fuels in regenerative cooling,the heat transfer and flow mechanism of film cooling under supersonic mainstream conditions, and the heat transfer and flow mechanism of transpiration cooling.

Pore-scale visualization on a depressurization-induced CO2 exsolution

The pore-scale behavior of the exsolved CO_2 phase during the depressurization process in CO_2 geological storage was investigated.The reservoir pressure decreases when the injection stops or when a leaking event or fluid extraction occurs.The exsolution characteristics of CO_2 affect the migration and fate of CO_2 in the storage site significantly.Here,a micromodel experimental system that can accommodate a large pressure variation provides a physical model with homogeneous porous media to dynamically visualize the nucleation and growth of exsolved CO_2 bubbles.The pressure decreased from 9.85 to 3.95 MPa at different temperatures and depressurization rates,and the behavior of CO_2 bubbles was recorded.At the pore-scale,the nuclei became observable when the CO_2 phase density was significantly reduced,and the pressure corresponding to this observation was slightly lower than that of the severe expansion pressure region.The lower temperature and faster depressurization rate produced more CO_2 nuclei.The exsolved CO_2 bubble preferentially grew into the pore body instead of the throat.The progress of smaller CO_2 bubbles merging into a larger CO_2 bubble was first captured,which validated the existence of the Ostwald ripening mechanism.The dispersed CO_2 phase after exsolution shows similarity with the residually trapped CO_2.This observation is consistent with the low mobility and high residual trapping ratio of exsolved CO_2 measured in the core-scale measurement,which is considered to be a self-sealing mechanism during depressurization process in CO_2 geological storage.

Role of trapped liquid in flow boiling inside micro-porous structures:pore-scale visualization and heat transfer enhancement

Flow boiling is an important heat dissipation method for cooling high heat flux surfaces in many industrial applications.The heat transfer can be further enhanced by using porous media surfaces due to their high specific surface areas.However,although flow boiling in channels is well understood,the phasechange behavior with the additional capillary effect induced by the porous structures is not well understood,and the design of the porous structures is difficult to avoid dryout and over-temperature accidents.A pore-scale lab-on-a-chip method was used here to investigate the flow boiling heat transfer characteristics inside micro-porous structures.The flow patterns,captured in the two-phase region with a uniform pore-throat size of 30 lm,showed that liquid was trapped in the pore-throat structures as both dispersed liquid bridges and liquid films.Moreover,the liquid film was shown to be moving on the wet solid surface by laser-induced fluorescence and particle tracking.A theoretical analysis showed that the capillary pressure difference between adjacent liquid bridges could drive the liquid film flows,which helped maintain the coolant supply in the two-phase region.The pore-throat parameters could be designed to enhance the capillary pressure difference with multiple throat sizes of 10–90 lm which would enhance the heat transfer 5%–10%with a 5%–23%pressure drop reduction.This research provides another method for improving the flow boiling heat transfer through the porous structure design besides changing the surface wettability.