The Scheme Design and Experimental Study about the Two-Phase Fluid Loop on China's Spacelab 2005-01-2940

In this paper, on the background of the incoming development of the spacelab in China, Capillary Pumped Loop (CPL) has been taken as the example to study the application of the two-phase loop in space. According to the preliminary scheme design, an engineering model is established on the ground, and some details about the engineering model are depicted, including the configuration, design considerations and some main design parameters. And by a series of experiments on the engineering model, kinds of characteristic performances of the two-phase loop are investigated. By the analysis of the phenomena from the experiments, it can be known that, two-phase fluid loop like CPL can be taken as a promising technique to be used in the future large scale spacecraft like spacelab. However, because of the operation instability and oscillation of the CPL under certain circumstances, further studies should be conducted before the engineering application of this technique.