🏆 Best Project Award – Third Place
The objective of this project is to evaluate the concept of hydrogel-based transpiration cooling within the context of highly transient heat loads resulting from atmospheric drag experienced by high speed aerospace vehicles.
Sponsored by: Applied Physics Laboratory – Johns Hopkins University
Team Members
Joseph Broniszewski Xinsheng Wei Jiho Park Matthew Miller Yasi Huang
Instructor: Dr. Chao-Yang Wang
Project Poster
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Project Video
Project Summary
Overview
The goal of the project was to combine the two existing technologies of hydrogel and transpiration cooling into one new design that would serve as a proof of concept. The team had to design and fabricate test coupons that exhibited geometry that was representative of aerospace vehicle fin tips, while also incorporating features that would allow for hydrogel-based transpiration cooling. Additionally, the test coupons needed to be tested at APL’s test facilities. Finally, the empirical test results were then compared against simulated results generated in parallel with physical coupon design and testing.
Objectives
The objectives for this project were to:
– Design and fabricate three test coupons
– Ship coupons to APL’s facilities for thermal testing
– Conduct simulation efforts to model expected coupon performance
– Draw conclusions about the effectiveness of hydrogel-based transpiration cooling as a proof of concept
Approach
To achieve these objectives, the team:
– Met with the project sponsors virtually to gather their customer needs and project constraints
– Created coupon designs
– Iterated upon coupon design with feedback from project sponsors
– Created detail CAD assembly of final coupon design
– Utilized external vendor to fabricate the coupon designs using a mixture of metal additive manufacturing and water jet cutting
– Assembled coupons
– Shipped coupons to project sponsor to undergo thermal testing within their HVOF testing facility
– Received testing data in the form of temperature measurements made at various locations within test coupons
– Created Solidworks thermal simulations
– Generated expected results from computer model simulations
– Compared the simulated results against the experimental results
– Generated conclusions about effectiveness of hydrogel-based transpiration cooling
– Generated conclusions about accuracy of thermal simulations
Outcomes
From the physical testing, it was shown that hydrogel-based transpiration cooling offers significantly improved performance over identical geometries that lacked the cooling effects. It was shown that the use of embedded copper mesh within the coupons did not yield significant improvements in performance when compared to pure hydrogel. 2-dimensional thermal simulations within Solidworks were shown to capture the qualitative effects of the hydrogel-based transpiration cooling, although it should be noted that the exact magnitudes of system behavior varied between the model and the experimental results.