Fabian Hufgard, Christian Duernhofer, Stefan Loehle, Sven Schweikert, Clemens Mueller, Giuseppe di Martino, Hannah Boehrk, Johan Steelant, Stefanos Fasoulas
DOI Number XXX-YYY-ZZZ
Conference Number HiSST-2022-411
We present a new approach in theory and experiment to automatically adjust the transpiration cooling
to the actual thermal load, i.e. the Cooling Adjustment for Transpiration Systems (CATS). This approach
bases on the real-time determination of surface heat flux at the transpiration cooled wall. The heat
flux is essentially calculated from a non-intrusive measurement of pressure in the plenum, i.e. the
region between mass flow controller and porous wall. This pressure heat flux transformation additionally
attenuates a destabilizing positive feedback loop, where the transpiration cooling controller’s output (i.e.
mass flow rate) strongly influences its input (i.e. plenum pressure). We describe the identification of the
model parameters for the heat flux determination, which are found and verified by a calibration approach.
CATS was demonstrated in the plasma wind tunnel PWK4 at the Institute of Space Systems, Stuttgart.
The results show the CATS performance, which proves the usefulness of the proposed approach to
automatically adjust the transpiration cooling to the actual thermal load.