Thermal design analysis of a liquid hydrogen vessel

Thermal analysis has been performed to design a high-performance liquid hydrogen (LH2) vessel. Analysis includes the combined insulation of multi-layer insulation (MLI) and vapor-cooled radiation shield (VCS) under high vacuum. Three types of combined insulation schemes are considered in this study; fully-filled MLI and serial-type double vapor-cooled radiation shield (DVCS); fully-filled MLI and parallel-type DVCS; partially-filled MLI and single vapor-cooled radiation shield (SVCS). Thermal analysis for a vapor-cooled heat station to reduce solid conduction heat in-leak through a filling tube is also made. The results indicate that the serial-type DVCS vessel shows better performance than parallel-type DVCS vessel. The combined insulation of SVCS and partially-filled MLI shows a similar performance compared to that of DVCS and fully-filled MLI. The vapor-cooled heat stations can enhance substantially the performance of the vessel for cryogenic fluids with high Cp/hfg, where Cp the specific heat and hfg the latent heat of vaporization, such as LH2 and liquid helium (LHe).