Design And Coupling Analysis Of Cold Plate Of Airborne Active Phased Array Antenna

Airborne active phased array radar takes a qualitative leap to airborne radars,because it realizes the change from mechanical scanning to electronic scanning, andfrom a single function to muti-function. Active phased array radar has become theinevitable development trend of next-generation fire-control radar, and is the mainmark of fourth generation fighter.The power consumption of active phased array radar focused on the antenna. Thethermal design of airborne active phased array antenna directly relates to the antennaelectrical performance, and finally affects the phased array radar performances such asdetection, tracking and identification. Due to the limit of airborne platform, there is agreat challenge to airborne active phased array antenna’s thermal design. According tothe structure and temperature field characteristics of T/R modules of active phasedarray antenna, base on the states of the thermal control technology and cold platedesign at home and aboard, a method is proposed to design cold plate, which wasbased on the3-D modeling software Pro/E and flow-thermal simulation softwareANSYS CFX. Furthermore, the fluid-thermal coupling analysis of cold plate ofairborne phased array antenna was discussed thoroughly.The software Pro/E was used for building3D model of cold plate, software ICEMCFD for meshing, software CFX-Pre for pre-processing, software CFX-Solver forsolving management and software CFX-Post for post-processing. The flow field andtemperature field of cold plate of airborne active phased array antenna were calculated.And the effect of inlet speed and temperature of cooling fluid and guide plate to coldplate on heat dissipation characteristics were analyzed. The simulation results showedthat, increasing the cooling fluid’s inlet speed, decreasing cooling fluid’s inlettemperature and adding guide plate number on fluid channel could reduce themaximum temperature of hot source. But with the increase of inlet speed and guideplate number, the pressure drop continues to grow. Therefore, in order to design thebest cold plate structure, it is necessary to implement an integrated optimization of theinlet speed of cooling fluid and number and size of guide plate.