Experimental investigations on copper foam/PCM composite-based thermal control hardware (TCH) using foam samples with different pore sizes under intermittent thermal conditions

Modern electronic devices work in intermittent thermal conditions, especially satellites and spacecrafts subsystems and require robust thermal management systems. The current work examines a thermal control hardware (TCH) under intermittent thermal heating powers. The TCH was integrated with PCM/copper foam combination to boost the PCM thermal conductivity. Three scenarios were investigated: the TCH without PCM, the TCH with pure PCM, and the TCH with PCM/copper foam (CF) composite, each at thermal power of 5 W, 7 W, and 10 W. Further, the effect of CF pore size was investigated using three samples of copper foam with pores per square inch (PPI) of 30, 20, and 10. The heat was supplied to the TCH with a calibrated electric heater. For the cooling process, a Peltier cooler was integrated into the TCH cover plate. The findings showed that copper foam sample with 30 PPI could reduce the maximum temperature by about 8.9 %. In addition, the other samples of 20 PPI and 10 PPI reduced the temperature by 5.1 % and 2.8 %, respectively. It was remarked that increasing the foam PPI increased the TCH apparent specific heat significantly. Further, increasing the foam pore size decreased the PCM supercooling remarkably.