Abstract
This article addresses a long-term thermal dynamic analysis problem for aircraft fuel tank and the related solution. The new method combines the thermal node network analysis and the finite element numerical calculation based on the OpenFOAM software. Compared to the thermal node network analysis algorithm, the computational precision is significantly improved by numerical calculation on more delicate grid in the solid region. On the other hand, compared to conventional finite element numerical calculation method, the computational efficiency is significantly improved since the liquid level at every moment is determined by the volume integral of every grid along the gravity direction instead of volume of fluid method on the Fluent software and two thermal nodes are used to represent the air and the fuel, respectively, and solve the two-phase heat transfer with the fuel tank by the aid of grid computation of the heat exchange area. Taken a typical fuel tank heated by aerodynamic heat as an example, the results comparing to the volume of fluid calculation by Fluent software show that the computation time is reduced to 10.3%, while the max deviation of the tank wall temperature is kept within 6.5%, which meets the requirements of engineering calculation precision.
Highlights
The demands for thermal management in wide range of air vehicle systems are growing rapidly along with the increased mission power, vehicle survivability, flight speeds, and so on
Taken a typical fuel tank heated by aerodynamic heat as an example, the calculation results comparing to the method of volume of fluid (VOF) by Fluent software show that the computation time is reduced to 10.3% which means the whole computation time for a typical trajectory of the magnitude of a thousand seconds is controlled within a week, while the max deviation of the tank wall temperature is kept within 6.5%, which meets the requirements of engineering calculation precision
Aiming at solving the long-term thermal dynamic analysis problem for aircraft fuel tank, a new method combining the thermal node network analysis and the finite element numerical calculation based on the OpenFOAM software is designed and implemented
Summary
The demands for thermal management in wide range of air vehicle systems are growing rapidly along with the increased mission power, vehicle survivability, flight speeds, and so on. A new algorithm further combining the thermal node network model with the finite element numerical calculation is designed It uses two thermal nodes with certain quality and temperature to respectively represent the two phases and solve the two-phase heat transfer problem in the fuel tank by aid of grid computation. The total heat flux from the fuel tank to the air or the fuel node during the update time step of Dtupdate can be obtained by integrating the convective heat flux of each face unit of the fluid–solid coupling interface, which can be calculated as follows. The new algorithm has three main steps: divide the air– fuel region according to the drawdown; calculate the radiation heat flux on fluid–solid surface; obtain the temperature of the fluid nodes and the solid region. The results by the VOF method on the Fluent softthermal insulation layer, the fluid and the solid ware are shown in Figure 6 and the temperature conregion of the fuel tank do not have obvious tem- trast results of these two methods are shown in Table perature rise
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