Passive Thermal Management for Advanced Vehicles

The use of advanced technologies is proliferating on board military and commercial ground vehicles. New power sources such as fuel cells and batteries create unique cooling requirements. The use of electronics for power conditioning, diagnostics and control, and military applications (command and control, weapons systems) leads to ever increasing heat loads which must be rejected from the vehicle. With limited on-board weight and power budgets, an innovative, passive, highly efficient thermal management system is needed. The development of a multi-evaporator, looped heat pipe thermal bus system is proposed to meet such a need. This technology provides the capability to collect heat from disparate sources and reject it from a central location, simplifying the management of the on-board thermal systems. A program is proposed to sufficiently develop a vehicle-specific design to address how a thermal bus would be integrated with a vehicle and show the vehicle level benefits (reduced weight, improved thermal control, increased device reliability and life expectancy), and to demonstrate this technology with a test on a functioning hardware mock-up. Issues of modularity, control, and adaptability to changing environmental conditions will be addressed.