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The current trend in military avionics design is to physically move electronics closer to the components they control. This saves on weight, increases component maintainability, reduces aircraft manufacturing costs, and reduces the amount of electromagnetic shielding. A disadvantage to this trend is the difficulty in achieving thermal control of these remotely located electronics. Accordingly, this thermal control issue is being addressed through the development of a flexible loop heat pipe cold plate (FLHPCP). The FLHPCP is different than previous hardware of its kind by the fact that it operates in any orientation. The prototype FLHPCP that was fabricated and tested was 29 inches long and weighed 1.7 pounds. At full adverse orientation (evaporator vertically above condenser), the prototype met the 45 watt heat load requirement at an average evaporator cold plate-to-condenser cold plate temperature drop of 20°C. Reduction of this temperature drop is planned in future development.

The objective of this paper is to describe the results of a technical effort that demonstrated the feasibility of a heat pipe radiator for the M109 A6 Howitzer. The technical effort consisted of the following three parts: establishing full-scale M109 A6 radiator design requirements, designing a full scale heat pipe radiator, and fabricating and testing a representative segment of the full scale heat pipe radiator to demonstrate thermal and hydraulic performance. The design predictions of the heat pipe radiator showed good agreement with the measured test results. Experimental test results indicated that the representative segment heat pipe radiator met and exceeded the design heat load requirement under extreme environmental conditions.

The current trend in military avionics design is to physically move electronics closer to the components they control. This saves on weight, increases component maintainability, reduces aircraft manufacturing costs, and reduces the amount of electromagnetic shielding required. A disadvantage to this trend is the difficulty in achieving thermal control of these remotely located electronics. Accordingly, this thermal control issue is being addressed through the development of a loop heat pipe cold plate (LHPCP). The LHPCP is different than previous hardware of its kind by the fact that it operates in any orientation. The prototype LHPCP that was fabricated and tested was 30 inches long and weighed 1.2 pounds and was able to transport a minimum of 160 watts in any orientation. Future LHPCPs will be made flexible to allow relative motion between the package to be cooled and the heat sink.