Bionic strategy enhances gravity adaptability of airborne latent heat storage

Integrated thermal management of supersonic aircraft has become a major requirement to enhance operational performance. To this end, this study investigates an innovative thermal management solution that combines bionic latent heat storage exchanger (LHSE) and fuel regenerative cooling, focusing on the gravitational adaptability of LHSEs. Through the construction of a numerical model, this study analyzes the influence mechanism of different flight attitudes and quantitatively investigates the performance stability of LHSEs configured with rectangular fins, bionic tree-shaped fins, and ladder-shaped fins under different overload directions and intensities (0–16 g). The results show that the bionic LHSE exhibits the best adaptability to gravitational loads, with its heat storage and release powers increased by up to 44.3% and 4.9 times than other LHSEs, respectively. Moreover, under varying overload directions and intensities, the maximum changes in phase change time and heat transfer power during the heat storage and release processes of the bionic LHSE are only 7.4% and 1.73%, respectively. Additionally, this novel thermal management scheme outperforms the fuel regenerative cooling scheme in both aircraft payload and power consumption, particularly when the cruise time is ≥ 73 min, where these advantages become more pronounced with increasing cruise duration.