All-metallic sandwich panels with prismatic cores are being currently investigated for combined structural and active cooling performance. We present a new approach to active cooling performance, and use it to optimize the panel geometry for four different systems: aluminum-air, aluminum-water, aluminum-gasoline and titanium-gasoline. The results show that some geometric parameters can be fixed without much detriment in thermal performance. Moreover, while optimal core densities are typically 25-50%, near-optimal results can be obtained with densities as low as 10%. These findings provide considerable geometric flexibility when attempting combined thermal and structural optimization. (c) 2006 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.