Today's military aircraft are extremely weight critical in order to ensure performance and fuel efficiency. New, replacement, or upgraded electronic systems have much more stringent system weight requirements than those in the past. In addition to being weight critical, space and volume have also become limiting design criterias in order to make the systems adaptable for multiple platforms. Tied with the requirements for expanded system capability, this results in densely populated electronic enclosures with increased thermal loads. Finally, the enclosures must be structural in nature in order to operate on multiple platforms such as fixed and rotary wing aircraft. This effort investigated new thermal management materials necessary to fabricate lighter weight, readily producible, structural composites for air-cooled electronic enclosures. The materials and fabrication methods had to meet concurrent engineering design requirements. These included mechanical, electrical, environmental, manufacturing, producibility, reliability, and cost requirements. Prototype composite chassis were designed, developed, built and tested within ten months. The weight of the chassis decreased by approximately 34% when measured against a baseline brazed aluminum chassis. Using high thermally conductive fibers, the thermal loads were efficiently dissipated to ensure reliability of the internal sub-components. Testing verified the durability of the chassis under multiple platform requirements.
Advanced composite materials for air-cooled electronic enclosures
1997
8 Seiten
Conference paper
English
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