Method applied to evaluate heat leakage of cryogenic vessel for liquid hydrogen

Cryogenic vessels are special equipment that requires periodic evaluation of their thermal insulation performance. At the current standard, the test is considered as the loss product or heat leakage of cryogenic vessel, which takes over 72 h to evaluate; consequently, a large amount of working medium is discharged to the environment in the process. However, hydrogen is flammable and explosive, and the discharged gas may be dangerous. If liquid hydrogen is replaced with liquid nitrogen before testing, the operation then becomes complicated, and the loss product or heat leakage cannot respond to the thermal insulation performance of cryogenic vessels for liquid hydrogen. Therefore, a novel method is proposed to evaluate the heat leakage of cryogenic vessels for liquid hydrogen in self-pressurization. In contrast to the current testing methods, the method proposed in this study does not require discharge or exchange of working medium in all test processes. The proposed method is based on one-dimensional heat transfer analysis of cryogenic vessels, which is verified by experiment. When this method is used to predict the heat leakage, the comparison with the experimental data of the standard method shows that the maximum error of heat leakage is less than 5.0%.