Cooling Ability/Capacity and Exergy Penalty Analysis of Each Heat Sink of Modern Supersonic Aircraft

Abstract

The aerospace-based heat sink is defined as a substance used for dissipating heat generated by onboard heat loads. They are becoming increasingly scarce in the thermal management system (TMS) of advanced aircraft, especially for supersonic aircraft. In the modern aircraft there are many types of heat sinks whose cooling abilities and performance penalties are usually obviously different from each other. Besides, the cooling ability and performance penalty of a single heat sink is even different under different flight conditions—flight altitude, Mach number, etc. In this study, the typical heat sinks which are the fuel mass, ram air, engine fan air, skin heat exchanger, and expendable heat sink will be studied. Their cooling abilities/capacities, and exergy penalties under different flight conditions have been systematically estimated and compared with each other. The exergy penalty presented in this paper refers to the exergy loss of aircraft caused by the extra weight, drag and energy extraction of various heat sinks. The estimation models, as well as the results and discussion have been elaborated in this paper, which can be can be used to further optimize the TMS of modern advanced aircraft, for example, the layout design of various heat sinks and the improvement the control algorithm.

Thermal Management Technologies Used for High Heat Flux Automobiles and Aircraft: A Review

“…Note that while a large amount of literature focuses on automobiles, investigations on MEA and electric propulsion have been conducted only for several years in the aviation industry. However, compared with automobiles, what makes the thermal management of electronics on board aircraft much more complicated is that heat sinks of the aircraft TMS are very limited [20]. Figure 2 shows the distribution of different types of heat sink in a modern aircraft, and the locations and basic configuration of these heat sinks are also illustrated.…”

“…Figure 2 shows the distribution of different types of heat sink in a modern aircraft, and the locations and basic configuration of these heat sinks are also illustrated. These five heat sinks are ram air, engine fan air, skin heat exchanger, expendable heat sink, and fuel [20]. Among these heat sinks, the fuel, which is typically stored in the fuel tank system, is the most significant one [21].…”

Aircraft fuel thermal management system and flight thermal endurance

“…In addition to the engine cooling demand, environment control systems, supersonic skin friction heating and heat generation by electronics constitute critical considerations that determine the survivability of flights (Sousa et al 2014;Maalouf et al 2019). It is estimated that the avionic system of fourth generation aircraft such as the Lockheed Martin F22 can generate as much as 100 kW of thermal energy (Dooley et al 2013;Behbahani et al 2016;Mao et al 2019), and this number is expected to increase for the future generations of aircraft (Roberts and Decker 2014). Furthermore, the development of compact avionic systems along with advances in directed energy weapons and radars are expected to add to this thermal stress (Pangborn et al 2018).…”

“…The authors proposed different arrangements of air-to-air and air-tofuel heat exchangers that would cool the bleed air by as much as 400 o F, before it is used to cool D r a f t the turbine blades. On the other hand, Mao et al (2019) explained that ram air is typically introduced by protruding ram scoops or flush inlets before being sent to the equipment to be cooled, while engine fan air is ducted to each separately mounted heat exchanger, or circulated through the fan duct heat exchanger which is embedded inside the engine fan duct. In all cases, the use of air as a heat sink for aircraft thermal management comes with drawbacks including inflated compressor power consumption, significant drag penalty, and low heat transport properties.…”

Experimental Investigation on Heat Transfer Mechanism of Air-Blast-Spray-Cooling System with a Two-Phase Ejector Loop for Aeronautical Application

“…Another problem is how to dissipate the waste heat from the sprayed droplet should be resolved to ensure the stability of the system. It is known that the thermal management system (TMS) is an important and indispensable system of the aircraft and the typical heat sinks of TMS including ram-air heat sink, fuel heat sink, and skin heat sink [36], which could be used for dissipating the amount of waste heat from both gas-phase and liquid-phase. Nevertheless, the harsh working conditions will seriously decrease both stability and coefficient of the implementation capacity of the whole system, especially in an overload or microgravity environment.…”