Novel heat exchanger design and sizing methods for Future Advanced Aircraft
- Academic lead
- Dr Duncan Borman, School of Civil Engineering, d.j.borman@leeds.ac.uk
- Industrial lead
- Saman Samarasekera, BAE Systems, saman.samarasekera@baesystems.com and Andy Smith, BAE Systems, andy.smith27@baesystems.com
- Co-supervisor(s)
- Dr Amir Khan, School of Civil Engineering, A.Khan@leeds.ac.uk, Dr Jon Summers, School of Mechanical Engineering, J.L.Summers@leeds.ac.uk
- Project themes
- Computational & Analytical Tools, Multiphysics & Complex Fluids, Other
Next generation advanced aircraft are expected to deliver ‘Information Advantage’ to their customers and end users. Real time information about the environment in air, land, sea and space domains will be critical for end users to understand mission complexity and enable correct decision-making at a rapid pace.
To deliver this Information Advantage, a sophisticated suite of on-board mission systems will generate significant levels of waste heat. This waste heat will need to be carefully managed by an aircraft Thermal Management System (TMS). Heat exchangers constitute key components within an aircraft TMS and its heat transfer performance for a given size, and flexibility of physical shaping, have a strong determining effect on overall system performance and feasibility.
This research will investigate and evaluate novel heat exchanger design for future advanced aircraft thermal management systems.
The intention will be to continue with PhD research already carried out at the University of Leeds CDT. One such opportunity is to develop fast modelling techniques for either single phase, two phase or phase change material heat exchangers. Such techniques could form the basis for enabling optimisation of heat exchanger designs, both of more standard structures, as well as those with more complex structures without the need for high performance computing clusters. The ability to quickly size an array of different heat exchangers, present in an aircraft TMS using general purpose laptops, will be of great benefit to engineers in the aerospace industry.