The heat dissipation, transport and reuse management for hypersonic vehicles based on regenerative cooling and thermoelectric conversion

The thermal energy management (TM) of a hypersonic vehicle should concern the full process of the heat dissipation, transport and reuse. In this paper, the aerodynamic heat of a hypersonic cruiser is dissipated by passive thermal protection system (TPS), transported by regenerative cooling (RC) network, and reused by RC network and thermoelectric (TE) conversion component. The TM system accordingly includes three subsystems of TPS, RC network and TE component. An equivalent thermal equilibrium model and an overall equivalent heat transfer coefficient are developed to build up the mutual correlation between the aerodynamic heating and TM system instead of the one-way influence, and account for the coupling design rationale of the TM subsystems. For passive TPS, the distribution, area and weight of relevant concepts are obtained; for RC network, the determination method of the heat capacity and coolant mass-flow-rate is developed, and the heat transport performance at specific vehicle regions is numerically analyzed by using hydrocarbon and liquid hydrogen fuel as coolants; for TE component, a TE-AFRSI concept is established by integrating mid- and low-temperature TE stages into the advanced flexible reusable surface insulation (AFRSI), and the concept is optimized by considering the thermal protection, weight increment and heat reuse performance. The design roadmap of TM system is finally proposed and the influence of the overall equivalent heat transfer coefficient is clarified. The results show that the aerodynamic heat and the transported or reused heat proportion will increase, while the scale of passive TPS will be reduced by the increase of overall equivalent heat transfer coefficient.