Thermal design of heat pipe cooling systems: conceptual design and numerical development

This paper describes briefly the thermal design processes of heat pipes as vehicle cooling system and it mainly focuses on the numerical development aiming at predicting the pipe thermal performance, i.e. showing either the methodology and the supporting numerical simulations. Two different test-cases are considered to verify the code: a hypersonic commercial aircraft flying at Mach 8 cruise speed between Brussel and Sydney and a generic small LEO satellite. The choice of so different test cases relies on the ambition of verifying the in-house developed numerical tool potentialities in terms of heat pipe thermal performance prediction.