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When permanent bases are established on the moon, various methods may be employed to reject the heat generated by the base. One proposed concept is the use of a vertical thermal radiator operating with a parabolic shade. The shade reduces background environmental heating by several means, thereby, increasing the performance of the radiator. Specifically, the shade focuses the incoming solar radiation in a line above the radiator and through the use of thermal control coatings substantially reduces infrared radiation originating from the lunar surface. To further enhance the performance of the radiator, it is aligned with the moon's equator. Several different parabolic shade geometries were evaluated using the Thermal Synthesizer System (TSS) which allows the full spectrum of specular surfaces to be included in the modeling process.

The Systems Improved Numerical Differencing Analyzer and Fluid Integrator (SINDA/FLUINT) program is a thermal analyzer code which has frequently been used as a design and analysis tool, to determine the transient and steady-state response of various fluid flow and thermal networks. While this code has provided important information in the design and analysis of a variety of aerospace systems, the validation of the code has been limited to a few simple test cases, and did not examine the resistance-capacitance or fluid flow network solving capability of the code. For the current study, the predictions from several simple models were compared to their corresponding analytical solutions. The first comparison considered steady-state, one-dimensional heat conduction in a constant area fin with four different fin tip boundary conditions. The second portion of the study examined an infinitely long fin which rejects heat to the environment by a simultaneous convection and radiation process.