Monopropellant thruster is one of the most propulsion system types developed in the space industry. This system uses a single type of propellant that reacts in porous medium catalytic packed bed to generate thrust in the form of hot gases. The last decade, green propellant hydrogen peroxide (H2O2), also known as High Test Peroxide (HTP), thanks to its low cost and easy to store as liquid, is used as an alternative solution of hydrazine which is very toxic and not environmentally friendly. In the current study, hydrogen peroxide monopropellant thruster is investigated for application in the future satellites. A numerical simulation is performed using the Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD) software ANSYS Fluent in order to simulate fluid flow of hydrogen peroxide in thruster, and the finite volume method was employed for resolving the governing equation. Species transport model is applied in the single-phase reaction simulation using the Eddy Dissipation model (EDM) for turbulence-chemistry interaction. A mathematical approach based on the local thermal non-equilibrium (LTNE) model is used to describe the heat transfer through solid and fluid phases in the packed bed consisting of identical spherical silver particles. Several simulations performed allowed an optimal design of the injector, catalyst bed length and diameter and nozzle geometry, to achieve a 10N monopropellant thruster with hydrogen peroxide at 87.5% concentration.
Solar water splitting is a promising process for the storage and conversion of sunlight power into cleanburning hydrogen gas, this paper presents a CFD analysis of hydrogen production via a proposed packed bed thermochemical receiver/reactor system. The idea of this study is the use of packed bed of spherical ceramic particles coated with active redox ferrite materials. The first step is an endothermic reaction, nickel ferrite (NiFe2O4) dissociate thermally into nickel oxide (NiO), ferrous oxide (FeO) and oxygen at 1473 K, this reaction take place under 2 KW concentrated solar energy. The second is the hydrolysis step at 1073 K to form hydrogen and NiFe2O4, the latter is recycled to the first step for a new production cycle. The CFD code solves the momentum, energy and species transport equations. The temperature fields of the reactor solid & the fluid phases were attained using the local thermal non-equilibrium model (LTNE). The LTNE model sources terms were computed through the user-defined functions to couple the energy equations of the fluid phase and solid phase. The complete model was used to analyse numerically the reaction through the packed bed in order to predict the thermal behavior under different conditions (inlet velocity, packing arrangement and solar concentrated flux).
scite is a Brooklyn-based organization that helps researchers better discover and understand research articles through Smart Citations–citations that display the context of the citation and describe whether the article provides supporting or contrasting evidence. scite is used by students and researchers from around the world and is funded in part by the National Science Foundation and the National Institute on Drug Abuse of the National Institutes of Health.