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Enhanced Performance Evaporative Heat Sinks for Space Applications
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English
Abstract
An evaporative heat sink has been designed and built by AlliedSignal for NASA's Johnson Space Center. The unit is a demonstrator of a primary heat exchanger for NASA's prototype Crew Return Vehicle (CRV), designated the X-38. The primary heat exchanger is responsible for rejecting the heat produced by both the flight crew and the avionics. Spacecraft evaporative heat sinks utilize space vacuum as a resource to control the vapor pressure of a liquid. For the X-38, water has been chosen as the heat transport fluid. A portion of this coolant flow is bled off for use as the evaporant. At sufficiently low pressures, the water can be made to boil at temperatures approaching its freezing point. Heat transferred to liquid water in this state will cause the liquid to evaporate, thus creating a heat sink for the spacecraft's coolant loop. The CRV mission requires the heat exchanger to be compact and low in mass. The unit must operate over as much as a 9 hour mission duration with a 3 year docked lifetime. These design specifications led to the selection of a plate-fin, parallel flow heat exchanger as a prototype. This paper summarizes the pertinent design considerations for this type of heat exchanger and discusses the test results obtained to date.
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Authors
- Bonifacio Calayag - AlliedSignal Aerospace Equipment Systems
- Oscar Buchmann - AlliedSignal Aerospace Equipment Systems
- Helen Pickup - AlliedSignal Aerospace Equipment Systems
- Susan Rose - AlliedSignal Aerospace Equipment Systems
- Hal Strumpf - AlliedSignal Aerospace Equipment Systems
- Charles W. Dingell - NASA Johnson Space Center
Citation
Calayag, B., Buchmann, O., Pickup, H., Rose, S. et al., "Enhanced Performance Evaporative Heat Sinks for Space Applications," SAE Technical Paper 981779, 1998, https://doi.org/10.4271/981779.Also In
References
- Dingell, C. W. Hurlbert, K.M. “Environmental Control System for an Experimental Crew Return Vehicle” 27th International Conference on Environmental Systems Lake Tahoe, Nevada July 14-17 1997
- Anderson, A. F. Heat Exchanger Design Manual Allied-Signal Document 1983
- Tongue, .S. E. Swartley, V. “The Porous Plate Sublimator as the X-38/CRV Orbital Heat Sink” 27th International Conference on Environmental Systems Lake Tahoe, Nevada July 14-17 1997
- Holman, J. P. Heat Transfer McGraw-Hill Publishing 525 536 1986