Analysis and comparison of potential power and thermal management systems for high-speed aircraft with an optimization method

Abstract

Abstract Under the dual effects of aerodynamic heating and high-power electronic equipment heating, the heat sink and power demand of advanced high-speed aircraft have been exponentially rising, which seriously restricts the aircraft performance. To improve system cooling and power supply performance and reduce engine performance loss, a power and thermal management system (PTMS) with high performance, low energy consumption, and light weight urgently needs to be developed. In this paper, three modes of a potential PTMS with different heat sinks and bleed air sources are further discussed to analyze and compare the optimal matching with the flight mission at Mach 1-4.4. The equivalent mass method is used to uniformly assess the costs of the fixed weight, bleed, resistance, etc. as a function of the fuel weight penalty, which is chosen as the optimization objective. The optimization variables consist of the compressor outlet temperature, cooling air flow rate, and fan duct heat exchanger structure size. The results show that the intermediate-stage bleed air and fan duct heat sink are more suitable when the Mach number is less than 2, but the ram air bleed is highly suitable for flight missions at a high Mach number. Especially at Mach 3.4-4.4, the ram air bleed mode can respond to the cooling and power demands with a simple architecture.