Fuel Thermal Management System Considerations in the Aircraft Conceptual Design Process

摘要

A method to include fuel thermal management system considerations in the aircraft conceptual design process is presented. It is important to consider thermal loads during this design phase because the wet weight is determined. This does not only define the basic range capability of a given concept, but also its thermal capacitance. To include fuel thermal management architectures at this stage of the design four different simple architectures are derived. They are compared by augmenting an open domain aircraft sizing problem, taken from the literature, with thermal load requirements. The paper demonstrates that fuel thermal loads can be a limiting factor in the design problem, and the severity of this impact is architecture dependent. This is all accomplished at the conceptual design level, well before these thermal effects are normally considered in the design process.