Experimental measurements and mathematical modeling of cold plate for aviation thermal management.

• The application of the cold plate device to thermal management has evolved in the past fifty years from the cooling of computer chips to aviation thermal management, which is the application of interest in this paper. Numerical solution procedures for performance analysis of the device are currently being used in a commercial software package for automotive and aviation thermal management. A major objective of the present paper is to report on an elaborate and successful experimental work carried out at The Boeing Aerospace company for the purpose of validating the software package. For this purpose, powder fusion additive manufacturing (AM) procedures were used to build metallic cold plate test articles. The excellent agreement between the software predictions and measured performance provides confidence in the implementation of the software package. Additional relevant results are provided in the paper on the thermalhydraulic performance analysis of cold plates for aviation thermal management. This study, which has been motivated by the recent applications of the cold plate device in aviation thermal management, reports on physics-based mathematical models derived from the conservation laws of mass, momentum, and energy, and empiricism-based models. One of the objectives of the present work is to report on an elaborate and successful experimental work carried out on an additively manufactured device for the purpose of rigorously validating the numerical predictions. The excellent agreement between the numerical predictions and measured performance provides much needed confidence in the implementation, in the software package, of the offset-strip fin passage correlations, as well as in the software implementation of user-defined wavy fin correlations for aerospace heat exchangers and cold plates operating with ram air at Reynolds numbers below 8000. The contributions of this work can also be found in the development of a new and accurate thermal-hydraulic analysis procedure, referred to in this paper as plate-fin analogy. Results from this procedure are compared with those from thermal resistance network. The comparative study in this paper of the bulk and discrete enthalpy flux method is also new, as is the relative assessment of four off-set strip fin thermal-hydraulic models. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]