Abstract: The low temperature plume exhausted from a cryogenic wind tunnel may sink down, posing a severe threat to public health and safety. Quantitative risk assessment of cryogenic plume flow behavior therefore plays an important role in the design and optimization of a cryogenic wind tunnel. A numerical model with a modified Hertz-Knudsen relation considering the phase change physics of the small quantity of water involved is applied to analyze the dispersion of the low temperature nitrogen plume exhausted from a 0.3 m cryogenic wind tunnel. The homogeneous multiphase flow is modeled using the single-fluid mixture model. A model validation is presented for the exhaust plume from the US National Transonic Facility (NTF). The predicted results are found to be better than those predicted by National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA)’s two-stage analytical model. The influences of the environmental wind speed, the environmental wind temperature, the relative humidity, and the exhaust flow rate, on low temperature nitrogen plume dispersion are obtained. In particular, the parametric sensitivities of different influence factors are analyzed. The environmental wind temperature and the exhaust flow rate of the nitrogen gas have greater impact on the temperature of the plume near the ground than do the environmental wind speed and the relative humidity. The exhaust flow rate of the nitrogen gas has greater impact on the oxygen concentration near the ground than does the environmental wind speed, while the environmental wind temperature and the relative humidity have negligible impacts. The results provide guidance on the operation and design improvement of a cryogenic gaseous nitrogen discharge system to avoid its potential hazards.

Key words: Cryogenic wind tunnel; Plume dispersion; Computational fluid dynamics (CFD); Phase change

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