Recently, advanced aero-engines have become more and more important in the development of society, which are expected to be capable of higher and higher flight Mach number to meet the needs of modern life. However, considering the high total temperature of freestream and serious aerodynamic heating with high Mach numbers, the cooling and energy management thus become a serious challenge. Taking scramjet for example, the fuel flow mal-distribution in parallel cooling channels during regenerative cooling may cause severe energy waste and even over temperature. To get more information about this problem, in this work, a 3D numerical parametric analysis has been carried out for the flow distribution and energy utilization. The effects of aspect ratio, rib thickness and flow area in branch channels were studied and the mechanism of flow distribution with present configuration was analyzed. (C) 2017 Published by Elsevier Ltd.