Thermal Design Of Cold Plate Of Active Phased Array Antennas Based Structural-electromagnetic-thermal Coupling

Active Phased Array Radar becomes the mainstream of the development of radar,its performance depends mainly on the properties of Active Phased Array Antenna(APAA), APAA contains plenty of heating devices, including the T/R module, which issensitive to the temperature. Unreasonable temperature distribution would affect phasecontrol precision seriously. Meanwhile, thermal deformation would also lead to changesin the antenna radiation pattern, as a result, the electric performance can’t reach thestandard required, or even impossible to achieve, therefore, efficient cold plate coolingsystem is indispensable for APAA.Based on heat transfer theory, the paper firstly analyzes and summarizes thecharacteristics of cold plate and the form of channel structure, using numericalcalculation method to contrast the thermal performance of rectangular channel andcircular channel, at the same time, classifying cold plate layout. The result shows, usingthe same attributes of cooling medium, the Reynolds number, Nusselt number, heattransfer coefficient of circular channel is higher than that of rectangular channel.However, rectangular channel has relatively low processing costs and wide application,we should consider machining and property together when selecting. Furthermore, wepropose multi-objective optimization of cold plate according to the thermal designdemands of APAA. Optimization model is put forward from two aspects: channelstructure and cooling medium, so as to simultaneously satisfy temperature uniformityand case temperature restrictions of APAA. Certain airborne active phased array antennais tested as an example to demonstrate the validity of the multi-objective optimizationmodel of APAA. Having satisfied the thermal demands, the design of cold plate systemis put forward from the perspective of coupled structural-electromagnetic-thermal toguarantee the meet of thermal demands and, at the same time, processing qualifiedelectrical properties. Finally, software of the thermal design for cold plate basedstructural-electromagnetic-thermal coupling of APAA is developed using C++builderlangrage, realizing the coupled design for cold plate system, improving the efficiency ofstructural-electromagnetic-thermal coupling analysis of APAA.