Research on the Fin Performance of Air-Oil Heat Exchanger for Aircraft Engine

Abstract

Due to the increasing power of aircraft engine and the increase of airborne electronic equipment, high heat flux and uneven heat distribution are becoming new problems. It is a new attempt to use the air lubricating oil heat exchanger with inner flow channel, but the research on it is not deep enough. Airflow internal-surface air-oil heat exchanger is newly-design heat exchanger and different from tube-fin or shell-tube heat exchanger which is used in previous aero engine. This heat exchanger is equipped in internal surface of air intake of the aircraft engine, consequently the fin structure directly affects the heat transfer efficiency and fin side flow resistance of the heat exchanger, and further affects the stable operation of the oil system and the performance of aero engine. Therefore, three kinds of parameters of fin structure are analyzed in this paper, and the four parameters of average convective heat transfer coefficient, fin heat transfer area, fin heat transfer capacity and total pressure ratio of inlet and outlet are compared and analyzed. According to all research, the heat transfer capacity of the fin with uniform thickness is 3.4% higher than that of a gradual thickness fin, and the total pressure ratio of inlet and outlet is 0.0001 lower, If the heat transfer performance of the heat exchanger is emphasized, the uniform thickness fin has certain advantages, which provides reference for the design of air lubricating oil heat exchanger.