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This paper presents the design and performance of a flexible heat pipe cold plate (FHPCP) that was developed for transporting heat from electronics mounted directly on an F/A-18 aileron actuator to a nearby heat sink. The most obvious heat sink is surrounding structure. A one dimensional steady state heat conduction analysis presented in this paper indicates that utilizing structure is feasible for this application.

Current environmental control thermal management systems use a two-loop, two-exchanger arrangement to isolate the crew from potentially hazardous ammonia or Freon in the final heat reject loop. Although that method does provide isolation, it is not fault-tolerant and does not provide advance warning of an exchanger leak. A heat pipe heat exchanger under development improves the existing system by providing two levels of isolation between the fluid streams. The new heat exchanger is fault-tolerant and can provide advance warning of a leak. Described are the heat exchanger design, test results from a sub-scale exchanger segment, and the results of a design optimization and trade study.