Interfacial mass and energy transport during steady-state evaporation in liquid oxygen storage tanks

Abstract

Applications of cryogenic storage systems in aerospace, hydrogen and liquefied natural gas industry has been bloomed in the past decades. The evaporation process of stored cryogenic fluids directly influences the duration or even the safety of the systems. Existing experimental data are insufficient to support a comprehensive insight of cryogenic evaporation in the interfacial region. In the present work, more than 1000 temperature records were measured in the interfacial region of liquid oxygen. The temperature distributions parallel to the liquid–vapor interface was obtained to study the coupled influence of Marangoni convection and thermal conduction on evaporation characteristics. It was found that the temperature was not continuous at the interface, with a maximum temperature difference of 1.11 K. Marangoni convection contributed nearly 80% of the total evaporation energy. A theoretical model was established for interpreting the heat and mass transfer mechanism at liquid oxygen interface. A new correlation for steady-state evaporation of liquid oxygen was proposed, which provided a more convenient way to predict the coefficient of liquid oxygen in CFD applications.