Search Results

An effective thermal verification method for spacecrafts is introduced, in which their partial model or structural segment can be used in the test. The essence of this concept is to evaluate thermal design of the spacecraft by integrating a thermal vacuum test into thermal analyses system as a data generating subroutine. The measured temperature data are used for modification of the thermal mathematical model, which in turn requires to generate new test data for further refining of the model. Practically, the verification process is a kind of numerical simulation using the in-situ temperature measurements obtained from the thermal vacuum test run simultaneously with the simulation analysis. This direct coupling or “hybrid simulation” process is terminated when the thermal mathematical model is finalized to determine the spacecraft hardware design.

The Smart Radiation Device (SRD) is a new thermal control material that decreases the temperature variation by changing the emissivity without using electrical instruments or mechanical parts. The emissivity of the SRD changes physically depending on its temperatures. Bonded only to the external surface of the spacecrafts, the SRD controls the temperature. The drawback of the SRD is the high solar absorptance. The multi-layer film for SRD was designed in order to decrease the solar absorptance from 0.81 to less than 0.2 by putting multi-layer film on it and the optical performance of the Smart Radiation Device with Multi-layer film (SRDM) was evaluated.