Actively cooled plate fin sandwich structural panels for hypersonic aircraft

An unshielded actively cooled structural panel was designed for application to a hypersonic aircraft. The design was an all aluminum stringer-stiffened platefin sandwich structure which used a 60/40 mixture of ethylene glycol/water as the coolant. Eight small test specimens of the basic platefin sandwich concept and three fatigue specimens from critical areas of the panel design was fabricated and tested (at room temperature). A test panel representative of all features of the panel design was fabricated and tested to determine the combined thermal/mechanical performance and structural integrity of the system. The overall findings are that; (1) the stringer-stiffened platefin sandwich actively cooling concept results in a low mass design that is an excellent contender for application to a hypersonic vehicle, and (2) the fabrication processes are state of the art but new or modified facilities are required to support full scale panel fabrication.