Experimental investigation on mechanical pumped cooling loop for application in future space missions

Two phase mechanical pumped cooling loop is a promising thermal control system, which is just like a heat pipe, to realize heat extraction from energetic electrical equipment efficiently. In this paper, a brief review of the system design and work principle is presented, and a proposed experimental system was described. The system was able to accomplish the thermal management of up to 150 W by using carbon dioxide as the working fluid. The experimental work mainly includes fluid property test, sinusoidal temperature variation of boundary condition test and heat load impact test, and an investigation of the feasibility and stability of the mechanical pumped cooling loop (MPCL) has been conducted. The transient liquid distribution between the main loop and the accumulator was analyzed according to the experimental findings. From the experiments, it is found that the system presents a good pressure performance of the loop and is able to handle large temperature wave and heat impacts perfectly, and each part of the system performs a reasonable temperature wave if the temperature at the pump’s inlet has enough sub-cooling to remain in a liquid state.