Abstract
This paper examines and analytically reviews the thermal management systems proposed over the past six decades for gas turbine civil aero engines. The objective is to establish the evident system shortcomings and to identify the remaining research questions that need to be addressed to enable this important technology to be adopted by next generation of aero engines with complicated designs. Future gas turbine aero engines will be more efficient, compact and will have more electric parts. As a result, more heat will be generated by the different electrical components and avionics. Consequently, alternative methods should be used to dissipate this extra heat as the current thermal management systems are already working on their limits. For this purpose, different structures and ideas in this field are stated in terms of considering engines architecture, the improved engine efficiency, the reduced emission level and the improved fuel economy. This is followed by a historical coverage of the proposed concepts dating back to 1958. Possible thermal management systems development concepts are then classified into four distinct classes: classic, centralized, revolutionary and cost-effective; and critically reviewed from challenges and implementation considerations points of view. Based on this analysis, the potential solutions for dealing with future challenges are proposed including combination of centralized and revolutionary developments and combination of classic and cost-effective developments. The effectiveness of the proposed solutions is also discussed with a complexity-impact correlation analysis.
Highlights
New designs of gas turbine civil aero-engines are increasingly complex
We are facing with More Electric Aircraft (MEA) with higher demands on engines for thrust and power generation resulting in hotter fluids, higher components temperature and higher heat generation, which means critical thermal management issues
Some other embodiments are focused on this topic and its pros and cons from practical point of view [47,48,49]. These patents focused on cooling requirements of Gas Turbine Engines (GTEs) as well as engine fluids temperature limitations and based on defined boundary conditions, different structures and architectures for GTEs thermal management system were proposed in detail
Summary
New designs of gas turbine civil aero-engines are increasingly complex. Nowadays, we are facing with More Electric Aircraft (MEA) with higher demands on engines for thrust and power generation resulting in hotter fluids, higher components temperature and higher heat generation, which means critical thermal management issues. The first theoretical studies and embodiments’ presentation were undertaken, resulting in generation of the main ideas for the aerospace TMS: using two heat exchangers for the engine thermal management, using catalyst to increase the fuel heat capacity and oil flowrate tuning through the heat exchangers to control the engine fuel temperature. These ideas helped researchers to build a very strong integration phase in the field.
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