SAE TECHNICAL PAPER SERIES1999-01-2474TWA800 Fuel Tank Thermal Management IssuesFloyd A. WyczalekFW Lilly Inc.The Engineering Society For Advancing Mobility Land Sea Air and Space INTERNATIONAL34th Intersociety Energy Conversion Engineering Conference Vancouver, British Columbia August 2-5,1999400 Commonwealth Drive, Warrendale, PA 15096-0001 U.S.A. Tel: (724) 776-4841 Fax: (724) 776-5760The appearance of this ISSN code at the bottom of this page indicates SAEs consent that copies of the paper may be made for personal or internal use of specific clients. This consent is given on the condition, however, that the copier pay a $7.00 per article copy fee through the Copyright Clearance Center, Inc. Operations Center, 222 Rosewood Drive, Danvers, MA 01923 for copying beyond that permitted by Sections 107 or 108 of the U.S. Copyright Law. This consent does not extend to other kinds of copying such as copying for general distribution, for advertising or promotional purposes, for creating new collective works, or for resale.SAE routinely stocks printed papers for a period of three years following date of publication. Direct your orders to SAE Customer Sales and Satisfaction Department.Quantity reprint rates can be obtained from the Customer Sales and Satisfaction Department.To request permission to reprint a technical paper or permission to use copyrighted SAE publications in other works, contact the SAE Publications Group.GLOBAL MOBILITY DATABASEAll SAE papers, standards, and selected books are abstracted and indexed in the Global Mobility DatabaseNo part of this publication may be reprcxiuced in any form, in an electronic retrieval system or otherwise, without the prior written permission of the publisher.ISSN 0148-7191Copyright 1999 Society of Automotive Engineers, Inc.Positions and opinions advanced in this paper are those of the author(s) and not necessarily those of SAE. The author is solely responsible for the content of the paper. A process is available by which discussions will be printed with the paper if it is published in SAE Transactions. For permission to publish this paper in full or in part, contact the SAE Publications Group.Persons wishing to submit papers to be considered for presentation or publication through SAE should send the manuscript or a 300 word abstract of a proposed manuscript to: Secretary, Engineering Meetings Board, SAE.Printed in USA1999-01-2474TWA800 Fuel Tank Thermal Management IssuesFloyd A. WyczalekFW Lilly Inc.Copyright 1999 Society of Automotive Engineers, Inc.ABSTRACTThis study identifies the ambient conditions under which a so-called empty-Boeing model 747-131 fixed wing jet center wing tank (CWT), containing a residual fuel loading of about 3 kg/m3, less than 60 gallons of aviation kerosene (JetA Athens refinery jet fuel), could form hazardous air/fuel mixtures. The issues are limited to explosion safety concerns relating to certificated fixed wing jet aircraft in scheduled passenger service. It is certain that combustible mixtures do not exist in a fuel tank containing JetA type fuel at ambient temperatures below 38 (100F), the lean limit flash point (LFP) for jet fuel at sea level. Never the less, the original study by Wyczalek and Suh (1997), identified six rational conditions which can occur and permit hazardous mixtures to exist in a fuel tank.INTRODUCTIONThe history of the last hours of Trans World Airlines, Inc., Flight 800 Boeing 747-131, N93119 fueled with low volatility kerosene type JetA in Athens, Greece, arrival New York Kennedy 17 July 1997, departure for Paris, essentially empty center fuel tank of 50 m3 (12980 gallon) containing about 200 liters (52 gallons) of Athens refinery JetA fuel, exploding 11 minutes after takeoff at 4176 m (13700 ft) altitude, 12 km (8 miles) South of East Moriches, New York, 17 July 1997.The analysis is based on a mathematical model shown by Wyczalek and Suh (1997)1 to estimate the air/fuel mass ratios as a function of saturation temperature (boiling points at various pressures). JetA aviation fuel is a mixture of a wide range of heavier kerosene like HC molecules with a wide band of ASTM D86 distillation temperatures as shown by Wyczalek (1998)2 and Sagebiel et al (1997)3. Consequently, the properties of two single component hydrocarbon (HC) liquid fuels: octane and naphthalene, published by Marks (1996)4; are included to serve as standards. Although not in this paper, properties of JP6 jet fuel and aviation kerosene, both multiple HC species fuels, Zabetakis et al (1963)5,6,7, were in the original analysis to relate new JetA data to historical data.Further, air/fuel ratios from about 2 to 1 rich flammability limit (RFL) through about 35 to 1 lean flammability limit (LFL) are ignitable for gasoline and jet fuels (Zabetakis et al 1965)7. The temperature 380 C at one atm sea level, is defined