C5.1 - Total Thermal Management Design and Optimization

Future aircraft will have an increased number of low temperature heat sources below 100 °C that have specific thermal requests for safe operation. These mostly electric devices are located in different parts of the aircraft and need to be integrated into a thermal management system that does not only guarantee heat rejection to ambient air but also has a high power density. Both challenges, the integration of many distributed heat sources and the design of a lightweight system, are addressed with a holistic approach by developing a modular simulation framework in the programming languages Modelica and Python supported by exemplary experiments.

Project Objectives

• Thermal characterization of different aircraft configurations
• Investigation of accuracy and complexity of physically based component models and (reduced order) thermodynamic cylces
• Development of a design methodology for highly integrated thermal management systems
• Evaluation of advanced cooling technologies and energy harvesting