Under reduced gravity conditions, conventional gravity‐assisted steam generators do not function properly and shear‐driven or swirl type of devices must be used. Once‐through boilers with special inserts such as twisted‐tapes or swirl devices and rotating boilers have been previously studied. The once‐through boiler requires a liquid‐vapor phase separator due to the inability to vaporize all liquid completely to avoid burn‐out. These devices also encounter instabilities due to the sudden formation or collapse of vapor. The rotating boiler requires a large power input to operate and has less reliability due to moving parts and dynamic seals at high temperature. A liquid‐driven vortex boiling separator is categorized as a shear‐driven boiler, but creates centripetal‐driven buoyancy forces to form a gas‐liquid vortex by injecting liquid tangentially along the inner wall of the cylinder rather than rotating the body itself. The vortex boiling separator eliminates the disadvantages of devices mentioned above, having a low pressure drop, no moving parts and generating dry vapor at its outlet. Texas A&M University carried out a reduced gravity flight experiment on the NASA C‐9 aircraft to investigate the heat transfer characteristics and performance based on similar devices developed at Texas A&M.
Heat Transfer Characteristics of Liquid‐Driven Swirl Boiling Liquid/Gas Separator under Reduced Gravity
SPACE, PROPULSION & ENERGY SCIENCES INTERNATIONAL FORUM: SPESIF‐2009 ; 2009 ; Huntsville (Alabama)
AIP Conference Proceedings ; 1103 , 1 ; 14-21
2009-03-16
8 pages
Conference paper
Electronic Resource
English
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