Improvement of regenerative cooling performance of hydrocarbon fuel via hybrid flow configuration

An innovative hybrid flow configuration is proposed to improve the cooling performance of regenerative cooling systems using endothermic hydrocarbon fuel (EHF) as the coolant. The flow and heat transfer characteristics of both hybrid and traditional flow configuration are investigated and compared numerically. Parametric simulation of cases with different flow ratios, heat fluxes, and gravity directions are conducted. Results indicate that compared with traditional flow configuration, hybrid flow configuration reduces the maximum solid temperature but elevates the n-decane conversion ratio (i.e., 3.49 % increment under heat flux of 1.5 MW m⁻² and flow rate of 10 %) and optimizes the temperature distribution. Further increase the flow ratio leads to higher conversion ratio (i.e., 10.04 % increment with flow rate of 20 %) while the maximum solid temperature increases slightly. In addition, hybrid flow configuration enables dynamic fuel regulation under complex and volatile thermal environments via alterable flow ratio, which is of great potential for the design of regenerative cooling system in the future.