Closed-loop Analysis of Thermal Energy Storage Device Arrangement in a Thermal Management System

There is widespread and growing interest in the design, analysis, and control of latent thermal energy storage (TES) devices that can enhance the performance of thermal management systems (TMSs) for high-powered electronics cooling applications. However, in many complex systems, including air vehicles, footprint and volumetric constraints may create limitations on the configuration or arrangement of multiple TES devices integrated within a TMS. This begs the question, "How does the arrangement of multiple TES devices, along with potentially different phase change materials in different devices, affect closed-loop system performance?" This type of analysis is not trivial, in part because it relies on design and synthesis of a reasonable, or better yet, optimal control strategy to govern closed-loop performance. Often, the models and tools used to optimize and analyze the design of TES devices are not compatible with control algorithm design and synthesis, and vice versa. As an important step towards answering the question posed above, the primary contributions of this work are (1) a graph-based hybrid TMS model that can simulate arbitrary specifications of TES device configurations and allows for specification of different PCM properties within individual devices and (2) a quantification of the effects of select TES device arrangements and PCM properties on the closed-loop performance of the TMS. While not exhaustive, this analysis is novel in relating TES device configuration and PCM composition to transient performance evaluation via scalable modeling and control synthesis tools.