| Sound understanding of the cooling efficiency of supercritical hydrogen is crucial to the development of high pressure thrust chambers for regeneratively cooled LOX/LH2 rocket engines. In this thesis, published correlations are compared to an extensive dataset compiled from previous heated tube experiments. Results indicate that particular correlations perform better than others for certain regimes of fluid properties, with over and under-prediction of the heat transfer ranging from +/-23% to over +/-100%. A number of published correlations for non-H2 supercritical fluids are shown to achieve comparable performance with hydrogen. The uncertainty on the correlations due to transport property uncertainties was determined to range from 2 to 10%, and therefore is not the main contributor to the errors in the correlation predictions. Finally, the impact on the design of regenerative thrust chambers and expander cycle engines resulting from inaccuracies in correlations was examined and found to be minimal for the models studied. |
