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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.

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.

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.

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