Heat and mass transfer of submerged helium injection in liquid oxygen vessel

Abstract

The submerged helium injection process results in the heat and mass transfer between the helium bubble and the cryogenic liquid. The objective of this paper is to analyze the dynamics of the heat and mass transfer process. It is observed that during the helium injection process the dynamics of mass transfer is dominant and the transient heat transfer is negligible. The helium bubble shape and rising patterns are observed with a visualization device that helps to discern the dominant process between heat transfer and mass transfer. The clustering patterns such as coalescence of helium bubbles are observed with the visualization device. The visualization results indicate that, it is very difficult to determine the representative size of bubbles due to the irregular shape of the helium bubbles. The shape and size of the helium bubbles are important parameters for evaluating the overall mass transfer coefficient (k(G)A) which is the essential parameter for calculating the evaporation rate of the bulk liquid into the helium bubbles. In this paper, the simplified lumped model is considered to fairly approximate the evaporation rate of the cryogenic liquid into the bubbles and the cooling rate of helium injection. The empirical correlation for the average concentration ((C) over bar (A)) of evaporated cryogenic liquid into the helium bubbles is presented and the overall mass transfer coefficients (k(G)A) are calculated as the result of the lumped model. The proposed model and empirical correlations are compared with the experimental results, and the comparison result shows good agreement with differences that are less than +/- 0.4 K.