High Temperature Oscillating Heat Pipe Transport System

High temperature heat acquisition and transport is a critical technology gap inhibiting full implementation of nuclear energy propulsion (NEP) and power sources for NASA inter-planetary and Lunar Surface missions.nbsp; Nuclear energy thermal management requires acquisition and transport of 4-10MW of power at 1200-1400K; the target heat flux is 1.0MW/m2.nbsp; Furthermore, NASA requires candidate technologies to transport heat 3-10 meters with a temperature drop below 150K.nbsp; ThermAvant Technologies (TAT) proposes to develop an Oscillating Heat Pipe (OHP)-based structurally integrated long distance high-temperature heat acquisition and transport device to meet this crucial need.nbsp; TAT will conduct an extensive performance and validation test program to quantify OHP manufacturing and operating metrics, and quantify advances over the current state of the art (SOTA).nbsp;The OHP is an emerging innovative thermal management device which has proven to be size, weight and power consumption and cost (SWaP-C) competitive for a number of heat flux acquisition and transport aerospace applications. nbsp; In the six-month Phase I program, TAT successfully developed the first ever large format high temperature oscillating heat pipes, which firmly demonstrated the technologyrsquo;s feasibility for the target application. In Phase II, ThermAvant will further advance the state-of-the-art (SOTA)