Comparison of heat transfer performance between liquid metal and aviation kerosene in the wall cooling channel of aero-engine

This paper explores the comparison of heat transfer performance between aviation kerosene and liquid metals in the engine wall cooling channel. The relative error between the experiment and simulation results is within 3 %, indicating that the simulation has good accuracy. Simulation results show that the temperature uniformity of liquid metal is much higher than that of n-decane, and the heat absorption uniformity of liquid metal has a higher correlation with the flow rate than with the temperature. For a specific heat flux and channel configuration, there is a matched inlet flow rate for n-decane to optimize cracking in the channel. Liquid metals and n-decane exist different optimal aspect ratios and rib thicknesses to optimize flow distribution homogeneity. Liquid metal is more suitable for wall cooling channel to recover energy under extreme flight conditions with high heat flux, because the disadvantages of n-decane cooling are more obvious under the extreme heat flux condition. Therefore, it is necessary to introduce suitable control means in the cooling channel to increase the chemical heat sink of n-decane. However, liquid metal does not need to consider such a complicated matching relationship, which may be another advantage of using liquid metal as a wall coolant.