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The objective of the work discussed within this paper is to present a modeling methodology to assess thermal management system (TMS) concepts for aircraft to determine adequacy in meeting thermal requirements and constraints for the duration of the flight1. To accomplish this, an analysis tool that has the capability to investigate steady state and transient thermal hydraulic conditions on a component to system-wide level is employed. This is achieved by simulating the conditions within a cooling network to provide temperature, pressure and mass flow rate distributions, as well as the temperature of surrounding engine and airframe structures. With today's reduced budgets, new aircraft systems will be less common and retrofitting existing high performance aircraft will become more common. Pushing these technologies to their thermal limits is resulting in cooling requirements that were not present or even contemplated during their original designs.

An engineering thermal management computational tool capable of performing component, subsystem, and system level thermal management assessment, design and optimization is the subject of this paper. The Vehicle Integrated Thermal MAnagement Code (VITMAC) simulates the coupled aircraft active cooling system thermal-hydraulics, associated airframe structure thermal response, and vehicle internally/externally generated heat loads. The formulation allows for predicting both the steady-state and transient thermal-hydraulic parameters along the coolant flow paths, as well as the temperature of the surrounding airframe/engine structures, to render the distributions of mass flow rate, pressure, and temperature of the operating fluids throughout the aircraft. Steady-state and transient illustrative examples are presented in this paper to demonstrate code capabilities. These examples show the coupling between the coolant-side thermal-hydraulics and structure-side thermal response.