Comprehensive Analysis of the Cold Plate Aviation Thermal Management Device

In a comprehensive study to better understand and model the cold plate heat exchanger in an aviation thermal management application, computer-based models, with the INSTED Thermal Analysis software package as the vehicle, are evaluated against experimental measurements carried out at Boeing for a number of parameters, including the Reynolds number, heat flow rate, Nusselt number, heat transfer coefficient, pressure drop, outlet temperature, temperature variation along the stream, and cold plate wall temperature distribution. Several j and f factors from the literature, which have been implemented in the software package, are also compared against results from the experiment for the offset-strip fins, as are the relative performance of the bulk solution method and the discretized enthalpy method in the software package. An approach referred to by the author as plate-fin analogy is compared with the method of thermal resistance network. Eight combinations of boundary conditions on the top and bottom surfaces of the cold plate are investigated, as is the performance of different fin configurations embedded in a cold plate, including rectangular, triangular, trapezoidal, and wavy frontal shapes; with stream-wise profiles that include plain, offset-strip, wavy, and herringbone configurations. The results are summarized in the paper.