Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Identifier

6464

Date

2019

Document Type

Thesis

Degree Name

Master of Science

Major

Mechanical Engineering

Committee Chair

Jeffrey Marchetta

Committee Member

Firouzeh Sabri

Committee Member

William S Janna

Committee Member

John I Hochstein

Abstract

The ability to store cryogenic liquids for long duration space missions is essential to future manned space exploration. Boil-off of cryogens due to incident solar radiation leads to self-pressurization of a cryogenic liquid tank. An ideal tank construction material would have low thermal conductivity and would retain its structural integrity through extreme temperatures. In previous research, a small-scale RTV-655/polyimide aerogel cryogenic liquid storage tank was constructed and tested to assess the performance of the compound material. Further development of RTV-655/polyimide aerogel cryogenic tanks for space applications is contigent upon performing computational studies to optimize the tank design and minimize costly experiments. Morever, computational heat transfer models, specifically models simulating conduction heat transfer through the RTV-655/polyimide aerogel compound, are dependent on accurate, measured thermal conductivity and volumetric specific heat values for the RTV-655/polyimide aerogel compound at the temperatures of interest. Thermal conductivity and volumetric specific heat values of the combination of RTV-655 and polyimide aerogel heave not been published at cryogenic temperatures. The transient plane source method was used to measure the thermal conductivity and volumetric psecific heat for RTV-655, polyimide aerogel, and three volume ratios of the compound at 313K, 295K, 253K, and the cryogenic temperature of 85K.

Comments

Data is provided by the student.

Library Comment

Dissertation or thesis originally submitted to the local University of Memphis Electronic Theses & dissertation (ETD) Repository.

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