Computational fluid dynamics simulations of jet fuel flow near the freeze point temperature

Under low-temperature environmental conditions, the cooling of aircraft fuel results in reduced fluidity with the potential for freezing. Therefore, it is important to study the flow and heat transfer phenomena that occur in an aircraft fuel tank near the freeze point temperature of jet fuels. The purpose of this dissertation is to study the effects of low temperatures on the flow, heat transfer and freezing of commercial and military jet fuels. The research is accomplished with the help of computational models of a thermal simulator tank and a quartz duct.; Experimental results with the thermal simulator tank show that fuel flowability and pumpability decrease substantially as temperature is reduced. Time-dependent temperature and velocity distributions were numerically simulated for static cooling. Measured properties were used in all the computational fluid dynamics simulations. The calculations show that stringers, ribs, and other structures strongly promote fuel cooling. Also, the cooler, denser fuel resides near the bottom surface of the fuel tank simulator. The presence of an ullage space within the tank was found to strongly influence the fuel temperature profile by sometimes reducing cooling from the upper surface. Moreover, since the presence of ullage space is an explosion risk, some military aircraft fuel tanks are fitted with explosion suppressant polyurethane foam. To study the effect of foam on the flowability and heat transfer inside the simulator tank, the wing tank thermal simulator was filled with military specified polyurethane foam. The tank was simultaneously drained and cooled and the mass flow rate results showed that flowability of the fuel is not affected by the presence of foam. However, the presence of foam certainly affected the heat transfer phenomenon inside the fuel tank when the simulator tank was cooled and drained simultaneously.; To study the freezing behavior of jet fuel under forced flow conditions, a quartz duct was fabricated. The duct walls were cooled below the solidification temperatures of JP-8 and JPTS fuel samples. Freezing was also simulated using computational fluid dynamics, and the validity of the calculations was established by comparing them with experimental measurements. This work demonstrates that computational fluid dynamics techniques can potentially be used to predict fuel hold-up in aircraft fuel tanks. The effect of flow rate on solidification was also simulated, and it was found that lower flow rates result in relatively more solidification of the fuel than do higher flow rates. The simulations of the freezing behaviors of JP-8 and JPTS samples were found to have essentially the same value of morphology constant. However, the crystal structures of these two fuels were studied in experiments and were found to be very different. This shows the inability of the model to capture small-scale details like the crystal microstructure. However, this limitation is not fatal here because the focus is on the overall flow and freezing behavior of jet fuels. The model was successful in predicting the freezing behavior by comparing the calculated frozen area obtained by the model with the measured area.