Validity evaluation of popular liquid-vapor phase change models for cryogenic self-pressurization process

Abstract

Liquid-vapor phase change models vitally influence the simulation of self-pressurization processes in closed containers. Popular liquid-vapor phase change models, such as the Hertz-Knudsen relation, energy jump model, and their derivations were developed based on room-temperature fluids. Although they had widely been applied in cryogenic simulations with liquid-vapor transitions, the performance of each model was not explicitly investigated and compared yet under cryogenic conditions. A unified multi-phase solver incorporating four typical liquid-vapor phase change models has been proposed in the present study, which enables direct comparison among those models against experimental data. A total number of 171 self-pressurization simulations were conducted to evaluate the evaporation and condensation models’ prediction accuracy and calculation speed. It was found that the pressure prediction highly depended on the model coefficients, whose optimization strategies differed from each other. The energy jump model was found inadequate for cryogenic self-pressurization simulations. According to the average deviation and CPU consumption, the Lee model and the Tanasawa model were proven to be more stable and more efficient than the others.