A Study on Topology Optimization of Aircraft Thermal Management System Based on Intelligent Optimization Algorithm

Traditional design methods, which depend on the experience of designers, make it difficult to meet the requirement of fast design due to the increasingly complex aircraft thermal management system (TMS). Therefore, this paper investigates the architectural design of TMS by the graph theory, and the intelligent optimization algorithm optimizes the flow rate of aircraft TMS. Firstly, the topology architectures of the aircraft TMS are generated by the enumeration method based on the component catalog and corresponding network structure constraints. In the topology architectures, the labeled graphs represent the TMS architectures, and physics-based models located in the graph nodes are used to evaluate the performance of each aircraft's TMS architecture. Secondly, to give the appropriate flow rate, this paper optimizes the flow rate for each aircraft TMS architecture by the intelligent optimization algorithm, and thus, the optimal flow rate and aircraft TMS architecture are obtained. Finally, the fuel circulation sub-system and environmental control sub-system of the aircraft TMS are used to verify the performance of this paper, and the results show that this paper's work can be applied to the sub-system of the aircraft TMS and the optimal flow rate and TMS architecture can be obtained by this paper's strategy.