Impact of Heat Exchanger Location on Engine Performance

Recent turbine engine numerical modeling developments have significantly improved the capability to accomplish integrated system-level analyses of aircraft thermal, power, propulsion, and vehicle systems. Combining desired aircraft performance with thermal management challenges of modern aircraft, which include increased heat loads from components such as avionics and more-electric accessories, as well as maintaining engine components at specified operating temperatures, demands we look for solutions that maximize heat sink capacity while minimizing adverse impacts on engine and aircraft performance. Development of optimized aircraft thermal management architectures requires the capability to directly analyze the impact of thermal management components, such as heat exchangers, on engine performance. This paper presents a process to evaluate the impact of heat exchanger design and performance characteristics (e.g., volume and pressure drops) on engine performance. As we are only concerned with sensitivity to the presence of heat exchangers, there has been no effort to optimize the heat exchanger design or the turbine engine flows to improve thermal or engine performance.