System-Level Integration

Do the aerodynamic and thermal performance improvements found at the component level actually translate into a meaningful engine efficiency gain, once the heat exchanger is represented within a full liquid hydrogen jet engine system model?

A component-level performance improvement doesn't automatically mean an engine-level one — the heat exchanger's aerodynamic loss and thermal effectiveness both feed back into the engine's thermodynamic cycle in ways that aren't necessarily linear or intuitive. Closing the loop back to the engine system model, first introduced in Stage 1, is what turns a heat exchanger design improvement into a defensible efficiency claim for the liquid hydrogen jet engine concept as a whole.

This stage of the DPhil is not yet complete. The plan is to:

• Feed the optimised conventional and novel heat exchanger geometries' aerodynamic loss and thermal effectiveness back into the liquid hydrogen jet engine thermodynamic cycle model developed in Stage 1
• Quantify the resulting engine-level efficiency improvement for each optimised design, relative to the original sized baseline
• Compare the system-level payoff of the conventional-optimum and novel-optimum designs, to determine whether the novel geometry's component-level advantage is justified at the engine level