Isomorphic modelling and solution approach for integrated aircraft engine and thermal management system

Within conventional design methodologies, the aircraft engine and thermal management system are handled separately, with each serving as the boundary for the other. This separation leads to excessive redundancy in the design processes of both aircraft and engine, making optimal aircraft/engine matching difficult and hindering overall performance improvement. Integrating the engine system with the thermal management system poses significant challenges due to the involvement of fluid transport and various forms of energy transport and transformation. The traditional models of these processes exhibit significant differences in their mathematical properties, resulting in high computational difficulty and poor convergence. This paper focuses on the engine and thermal management system, establishing isomorphic models of fluid transport and heat transport processes based on analogies from classical electrical theory. A unified solution approach grounded in network theory is proposed, effectively delineating the principles governing energy transport, conversion, and fluid transport within the system and clarifying the variations in system performance caused by changes in design or operational parameters. Computational results show that the proposed method achieves a deviation of less than 5 % compared to AMESim, a commercial simulation software, while being nearly two orders of magnitude faster, offering robust support for design refinement and optimization.