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This paper describes the Thermal Balance test that has been performed on EuTEF (European Technology Exposure Facility) platform, to be flown in October 2007 as an attached payload of Columbus module to the ISS. The thermal control system of EuTEF is based on a passive concept, with several different payloads being each one a self-standing technological experiment, with a centralized power supply and data handling. Each instrument has its own TCS, independent one another: they are individually insulated by MLI. The test has been performed with EuTEF Flight Model (FM) on the Passive Attach System to have representative thermal flight-like interfaces. Simulation of close-to-real flight environmental heat loads have been accomplished in a vacuum chamber (at INTESPACE, Toulouse-F) by means of a solar beam and a spin table suitably oriented to simulate a critical identified orbit, among all the possible on the ISS.

Improvements on the thermal analysis for system perturbed by micro-thermal fluctuations are presented: the method applies to any kind of (small) perturbation, in particular to the random ones. Opposite to time domain conventional transient analysis, this method answers the need for frequency domain thermal analysis dictated by the newest scientific missions, with tight temperature stability requirements (expressed in the frequency domain). The small temperature fluctuations allow for assuming any thermal systems a linear one; hence linear system theory holds, and powerful tools to calculate key parameters like frequency response can be successfully employed. MIMO (Multi-Input-Multi-Output) systems theory is applied, the inputs being perturbations to the thermal system (boundary temperatures oscillations and power sources ripple of any shape: pulse, step, periodic, random, …), while the outputs are the temperatures of the sensible parts.