Aircraft Thermal System Evaluation and Analysis Tools

This STTR project proposed by CU Aerospace (CUA) and research partner the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign (UIUC) will provide innovative thermal management systems-level analysis tools to the Navy, enabling detailed investigations of air platform thermal management issues associated with electronics loads (e.g., avionics/radar upgrades for military aircraft). The Phase I effort focuses on: (i) developing a suitable surrogate system-of-systems (SoS) thermal management architecture, (ii) producing custom block models for aircraft sub-systems, (iii) developing analysis-of-alternatives tools, and (iv) applying the adapted toolkit components to make preliminary SoS simulations linking generator loads to the oil and fuel -based cooling system. The proposed Phase I option period will extend the base period work by converting relevant models to compiled code and developing a graphic user interface design with input on workflow from the Navy. The Phase II effort will develop a higher quality and higher fidelity SoS model of a more detailed Navy architecture (based on inputs from NAVAIR/industry); the CUA-UIUC team will work with the Navy to develop and solve a candidate aircraft thermal architecture problem of interest in order to demonstrate the services which can be provided with the modeling, simulation, and analysis (MS&A) software package.