Uniformity principle of temperature difference field in heat transfer optimization

The uniformity principle of temperature difference field is very useful in heat exchanger analyses and optimizations.In this paper, we analyze some other heat transfer optimization problems in the thermal management system of spacecrafts,including the cooling of thermal components, the one-stream series-wound heat exchanger network, the volume-to-point heat conduction problem, and the radiative heat transfer optimization problem, and have found that the uniformity principle of temperature difference field also holds. When the design objectives under the given constraints are achieved, the distributions of the temperature difference fields are uniform. The principle reflects the characteristic of the distribution of potential in the heat transfer optimization problems. It is also shown that the principle is consistent with the entransy theory. Therefore, although the principle is intuitive and phenomenological, the entransy theory can be the physical basis of the principle.