With lightweight, multifunctional, and designable characteristics, porous/lattice structures have started to be used in aerospace applications. Porous/lattice structures applied in the thermal management technology of aerospace vehicles have attracted much attention. In the past few years, many related numerical and experimental investigations on flow, heat transfer, modelling methodology, and manufacturing technology of porous/lattice structures applied in thermal management systems have been widely conducted. This paper lists the investigations and applications of porous/lattice structures applied in thermal management technology from two aspects, i.e., heat transfer enhancement by porous/lattice structures and transpiration cooling. In addition, future developments and challenges based on the previous investigations are analyzed and summarized. With the higher requirements of thermal protection for aerospace applications in the future, thermal management technology based on porous/lattice structures shows good prospects.

At an extremely high Mach number, the regenerative cooling of traditional kerosene cannot meet the requirement of the heat sink caused by aerodynamic heating and internal combustion in a scramjet propulsion system. As a supplement of traditional regenerative cooling, supercritical CO₂ is regarded as an effective coolant in severe heating environments due to its excellent properties of heat and mass transportation. In this paper, the heat transfer and flow structure characteristics of regenerative cooling in a rectangular channel using supercritical CO₂ are analyzed numerically using a validated model. The effect of heat flux magnitude, nonuniform heat flux, acceleration and buoyancy and flow pattern are considered to reveal the regenerative cooling mechanism of supercritical CO₂ in the engine condition of a scramjet. The results indicate that the heat transfer deterioration phenomenon becomes obvious in the cooling channel loaded with relatively high heat flux. Compared with the cooling channels loaded with increased heat flux distribution, the maximum temperature increased for the channel loaded with decreased heat flux distributions. When larger acceleration is applied, a relatively lower wall temperature distribution and higher heat transfer coefficients are obtained. The wall temperature distribution becomes more uniform and the high-temperature region is weakened when the coolants in adjacent channels are arranged as a reversed flow pattern. Overall, the paper provides some references for the utilization of supercritical CO₂ in regenerative cooling at an extremely high Mach number in a scramjet.

With an increased inlet gas temperature and the homogenization of the combustion chamber outlet temperature, the endwalls of gas turbines are exposed to extremely high heat loads. The complex flow structure of turbine endwalls makes it difficult to cool some regions of the endwalls, which can easily cause endwall ablation, reducing turbine aerodynamic performance and threatening the turbine’s safe operation. In order to improve the cooling and aerodynamic performance of gas turbines, the flow structure, heat transfer and film cooling characteristics of endwalls are analyzed in depth in this paper. This paper summarizes and analyzes the development of the aerodynamic heat transfer and film cooling of gas turbine endwalls in terms of geometric structures and flow boundary conditions and also presents new research directions. Based on the literature, the development and challenge of turbine endwall film cooling are also discussed.