Development of the Actively Cooled Wing Leading Edge for the ASA Experiment

ASA (Advanced Structural Assembly) is an Italian Space Agency (ASI) technological development program which has the purpose to investigate and improve the knowhow on fundamental technologies relevant to the field of the space re-entry vehicles.

A wing segment collecting different experiments will be tested in the Plasma Wind Tunnel (PWT) available at the Scirocco facility.

One of the technologies under investigation is the active cooling applied to a wing leading edge element. That design solution is challenging both for manufacturing and for thermal-hydraulic aspects.

A dedicated analysis campaign was performed at design level and a development test was carried out on a representative “breadboard” to verify the basic assumptions before the manufacturing of the final technological demonstrator which will be tested in the Plasma Wind Tunnel facility.

This paper describes the above activities, the result of the development test and the thermal-hydraulic mathematical model predictions performed for the test environment.