Search Results

The lunar environment places some unique demands on a thermal management system designed for manned lunar missions. A principal concern is that for many prime base locations the effective thermal sink temperature is often near or above nominal room temperature (25°C). This is due to the fact that a conventional radiator must look at either, or both, the sun and the hot lunar surface. Direct rejection of waste heat at such temperatures is thus impossible, and some alternative approach is needed to enable a sustained mission. This paper presents three such alternative systems: a heat pump assisted central thermal bus; an innovative, selective field-of-view radiator; and use of the lunar regolith as a heat sink. All of these concepts appear feasible, but each has uncertainties associated with its practicality and weight estimate. The heat pump assisted thermal bus appears to be the most viable concept and is discussed herein in some detail.

Thermal conductances are computed by finite-element techniques for typical triangular elements.. Heat-transfer rates computed with these conductances are compared to heat-transfer rates computed from exact, closed-form mathematical formulas and from refined models. The comparisons show that significant simulation errors can occur in triangular elements that have an internal angle greater than 90 degrees. An alternative, centroid method is shown to give smaller errors by some measures and in some cases but larger errors in most cases.

The classical fencing problem occurs in radiant heat-transfer computations when a surface extends from one compartment to another, with the two compartments otherwise exchanging little heat. The surface that separates the two compartments is called a “fence.” If the gap between the bottom of the fence and the surface that extends under the fence is small, the potential for a large fencing error is evident from an examination of the drawings. In large models, with many surfaces forming many compartments, the fencing error is less evident. In this paper we examine the fencing errors in two prototype geometries. If the fenced surface is adiabatic, the error is found to be significant for surprisingly large gaps. A surface can be adiabatic due either to a high reflectance or a layer of insulation. The error is found to become insignificant when there is no reflectance.

Simulation of radiant heat transfer in large systems results in perhaps millions of radiant-interchange factors. In the interest of reducing computation times, some engineers frequently omit the smallest factors. Others combine the smallest factors into effective radiation nodes. Still others reduce the number of radiation factors by introducing fictitious partitions, known as multiple enclosure simplification shields that divide the large system into smaller systems. In this paper we examine the errors introduced by these various techniques and offer a new method that has the same accuracy as incorporating all of the radiation factors but requires little increase in computation time. The methods are compared by application to three simple models that clearly illustrate how significant errors can be generated if the methods are incorrectly applied.

Thermal conductances are computed for relatively simple node geometries that are typical of analytical models of spacecraft. Heat-transfer rates computed with these conductances are compared to heat-transfer rates computed from exact, closed-form mathematical formulas. The comparisons show that most accurate results are obtained with rectangular nodal arrangements and with triangular arrangements with interior angles less than ninety degrees. For rectangles, the conductances obtained from finite-difference, finite-element and centroid methods are identical. For triangles, the finite-element conductances are best. For other quadrilateral arrangements and triangles, the centroid method is the most reliable.