Advance Liquid-Cooled Avionics Enclosure

Composite avionics enclosures with liquid-cooled card guides are predicted to weigh less than current state-of-the-art aluminum enclosure. While there are many successes in developing composite-based Thermal Planes for advanced avionics applications, limited effort has been spent on the enclosure and significantly less on the card guide. The objective of this program is to design, fabricate and qualify a functional and light-weight composite avionics enclosure equipped with liquid-cooled card guides for high-power electronic modules currently being used on many advanced military aircrafts. Our initial effort will be focused on the development of advanced card guides using high-conductivity carbon-based materials. A typical card guide consists of card rails and an integrated heat exchanger. There are three critical thermal resistances along the entire thermal path – module to rail, rail to heat exchanger and heat exchanger to ambient. We propose to use high conductivity carbon material for the rail and to develop a high performance heat exchanger using advanced carbon-based materials for the core. We propose to evaluate subscale prototype card guides initially. Once it is proven, we plan to integrate the composite card guides with a full-size composite enclosure frame to be designed and fabricated for a selected application for performance evaluation.