Speaker
Description
The Lunar Orbital Platform-Gateway (LOP-G) space station is one key element of the NASA Artemis Program, which has the goal to bring humans back to the moon by 2024 and to provide a sustainable infrastructure for future missions. One of the LOP-G modules is the European System Providing Refuelling, Infrastructure and Telecommunications (ESPRIT) module, which contains, among others, the xenon refuelling supplies for the LOP-G Power and Propulsion Element (PPE). While electric propulsion and the associated on-board xenon storage is already commonly used on today’s space crafts, a relatively new field of studies is the in-orbit refuelling.
This presentation investigates the thermal behaviour of a xenon tank during a refuelling process in microgravity and its numerical representation. Furthermore, the physical assumptions and discretisations, which were carried out to obtain the final thermal model, are presented. For a flexible use of the refuelling model and an easy integration into already established thermal models on system level, ESATAN-TMS Fluid was used. Therefore the construction of the thermal model in ESATAN-TMS, the choice of a specialised fluid solution routine and the implementation of a Xenon fluid library including a supercritical phase are part of the presentation. Additionally, also the problems faced during the simulation runs with ESATAN-TMS Fluid and closer information about the attempts to fix those problems are presented, which was successful at the end.
