THE AFRL High Heat Flux project’s objective is to design and build a testbed capable of generating and dissipating high heat fluxes. The design is broken down into four main components. The first component is the heat source. In order to produce extremely high heat, resistors will be used as a heat generator. The high heat that it produces will be concentrated to a single area of 1 cm^2 through the use of a converging diverging oxygen free copper cone. The second part of this project includes the design of a thermal sink in order to dissipate the high heat loads. A cold plate and a refrigeration system provided by the AFRL will be used. Safety, the third component, is the primary concern with this system. Many issues can go wrong such as the heat source or thermal sink having a power failure. In order to regulate these problems, a microcontroller will be used along with thermocouples to sense the temperature of the system. The controller will be program to shut off in case of a critical temperature being reached. The last component of this project is to design and develop a mounting frame to hold a variety of test scenarios.

Objective – design, develop, and construct a testbed capable of producing and dissipating high heat fluxes/loads.

Goal – the goal is to create a flux of 500-2000 W/cm^2 and have the flux concentrate onto a small area of 1 cm^2. The cooling system will then dissipate the heat and allow the system to maintain safe temperatures; in particular, the concentrated area will be kept at room temperature.