Advanced boil-off gas studies of liquefied natural gas used for the space and energy industries

Abstract Growing interest in liquefied natural gas (LNG) as a rocket fuel demands reliable prediction and an improved understanding of the changes in its composition arising from the preferential boil-off of lighter components during long duration storage. Unfortunately, current methods of predicting boil-off gas (BOG) evolution from cryogenic liquids are based on limited experimental data. This work reports a series of new experiments which measure the temporal change in BOG production, composition, and pressure at industrially relevant conditions for both ternary mixtures of methane, ethane, and nitrogen and an LNG mixture used as rocket fuel. Faster pressure build-up rates are consistently observed with decreasing initial liquid volume fraction, whilst a decline of 8% in the LNG higher heating value was observed after thirty-three days of weathering. The data is compared with a robust and efficient superheated vapor (SHV) model, implemented in the software package BoilFAST, which allows for reliable calculations of self-pressurisation and boil-off losses for different tank geometries and thermal insulation systems. The model exhibits good agreement with the experimental data across all conditions explored. Finally, the potential effect of LNG composition and heating value changes on rocket engine performance was assessed by examining changes in the adiabatic flame temperature and burnt gas volume ratio. While our data suggest that the rocket engine performance would improve as a result of weathering, the effectiveness of the weathered LNG as a coolant in a regeneratively cooled rocket engine decreases.