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Feasibility and preliminary phases of space projects are aimed to answer to the very fundamental question whether a spacecraft (S/C) exists that can fulfil the mission objectives. In particular the thermal engineers must assess whether a possible configuration is feasible from the thermal point of view, or what modifications could make it suitable. The paper presents the Thermal Concept Design Tool (TCDT), a new software tool under development at Blue Engineering and Alenia Spazio for the European Space Agency (ESA), designed with the objective to assist the thermal engineers in reducing at minimum the effort required by simulation activities and focusing mainly on conceptual activities during feasibility and preliminary studies.

The calculation of linear conductors for a thermal lumped parameter (TLP) model, to be used with ESATAN (ref 1.) or SINDA, is one of the last parts of the thermal model preparation that is not yet fully automated. Most users calculate the conductors by hand or have their own special spreadsheets, or other tools, which can calculate some of these for a series of combinations of simple shaped TLP-nodes. For TLP-nodes with more complex shapes these tools cannot be used. The current paper presents two generally applicable methods to automate the generation of the linear conductors for thermal lumped parameter models

Nowadays there are many well-proved and widely used software packages for the analysis of thermal and ECLS systems for space applications. These packages tend to be difficult to work with when they have to deal with aspects related to other disciplines. It may be rather cumbersome for example to couple at run time an ECLS package and a thermal package that have to exchange variables such as interface temperatures and heat flows or to re-use thermal models in real-time spacecraft simulators to support training and operations tasks. DC (including protocols and client/server libraries) addresses the widely discussed issue of creating multi- disciplinary and distributed applications, but focusing on the special requirements of Thermal and ECLS analysis tools used by ESA and by the European Space Industry.

Numerous workers have made effort to harness the flexibility of spreadsheets to analyse thermal problems. One approach has been to execute a thermal analysis within the spreadsheet itself, however the usefulness is limited by the performance of the built-in solvers. In addition, spreadsheets must either be custom built for each application or founded on parameterised models from similar analyses. An alternate approach has been to add spreadsheet like capability to existing tools. Again, this loses the full flexibility of a spreadsheet. To overcome these limitations, ThermXL has been developed. ThermXL is a thermal lumped parameter network solver and generic model builder that is fully integrated within Microsoft® Excel. It is very flexible easy-to-use tool that is particularly suited to preliminary design and “What if…?” type parametric analyses. This paper describes the utility, functionality and architecture of ThermXL.

ESARAD and ESATAN have been the standard European space industry thermal-radiative and thermal analysis tools for a number of years. A major new development - under the working title of Polytan - seeks to integrate these tools and provide new functionality which will shorten the thermal engineer's analysis-design-verification cycle. The new tool will further extend the graphical model tree browser and tabbed workspaces look-and-feel, which was introduced in ESARAD version 4. While the main design goal is to achieve a shorter analysis-design-verification cycle, robust but practical configuration control and transparent management of model and results data are equally important driving requirements.

This paper reports on the first phase of the development of the STEP-based Thermal Analysis for Space Application Protocol (STEP-TAS AP), an initiative by the European Space Agency (ESA) in collaboration with the French Space Agency (CNES). The activity responds to the industrial need to have a standard, quality means for the electronic exchange of thermal models between the various companies and organisations involved in space projects and also to improve the possibility to exchange data with tools of other engineering disciplines (notably CAD tools). The development is based on the use of STEP, which is the casual name for the ISO 10303 Standard for Exchange of Product Model Data. The following topics are highlighted: The production of a common description of the information exchange requirements in the space thermal analysis domain, based on work previously initiated by ESA and CNES.

The ICETAS initiative from ESA aims to provide the European space community with: A framework for development and integration of software tools supporting the thermal design, analysis and verification process for space applications. Effective exchange of thermal analysis models and data. In phase 2 of ICETAS a consistent set of user requirements was formulated, derived from so-called Use Cases. The Use Cases give step-by-step descriptions of the interaction between the thermal engineer and the software system. ICETAS covers the thermal engineering process all the way from requirements analysis and conceptual design to test evaluation and flight support. The user requirements activity was followed by the definition of a complete, object-oriented information model (the Common Data Structure - CDS) capturing all data entities and associations needed in the discipline.