An Enhanced Calculation Method of the Heat Rejection System of a Free-Piston Stirling Engine (FPSE) Operating on the Moon

Abstract

In this paper, an enhanced calculation method of a heat rejection system operating on the moon is presented. This was taken into consideration in the developed calculation method and in the propagation of heat fluxes with the radiation of the removed heat. The developed method made it possible to effectively evaluate the capabilities of various refrigerants and choose the radiator parameters and the refrigerant flow regime in a less time-consuming process and with minimal deviations (<5%) compared to the previously developed two-dimensional radiator model by the authors. A comparative analysis was carried out for two refrigerants: helium and liquid ammonia. It has been established that when using liquid ammonia, there are more possibilities for varying the geometric parameters of the radiator. The use of liquid ammonia as a refrigerant made it possible to reduce the power spent on pumping the refrigerant through the radiator. Using helium, the power for pumping the refrigerant was NR= 5.1 W during a turbulent flow Re = 4500. On the other hand, the power for pumping liquid ammonia was NR= 0.27 W. In addition, using liquid ammonia increased the heat flux radiated by the radiator pipe by 3.9 times, which made it to possible to increase the fin width and reduce the length of the radiator pipe.