A tabulated real-fluid modeling approach applied to cryogenic LN2-H2 jets evaporation and mixing at transcritical regime

Abstract

Accurate, robust, and fast fully compressible real-fluid simulation of fuel jets is today's one of the highly debated topics in various research laboratories and industries. Indeed, the use of real-fluid equations of state has proved to be computationally very expensive and is one of the current challenges. In this paper, a thermodynamic equilibrium tabulation approach is proposed to overcome most of the limitations and to make real-fluid simulations affordable in the industry. This tabulation approach is implemented in the Converge software as a closure to the fully compressible two-phase and multi-component real-fluid model (RFM). This modeling approach has been applied to the simulation of a classical cryogenic injection of liquid nitrogen (LN2) coaxially with warm hydrogen (H2) jet, in a transcritical regime using thermodynamic tables generated by two different equations of state: Peng-Robinson (PR), and Soave-Redlich-Kwong (SRK). The numerical results are compared to available experiments and published numerical studies. The computational efficiency, accuracy, and robustness of the proposed RFM model are thereby confirmed.