Speaker
Description
Recently FOTEC started the development of 3D-printed heat pipes as a prospective thermal management solution for a high-power CubeSat thruster. The use of 3D printing could improve design flexibility and adaptability in geometrically confined situations, while enabling the heat pipe to be manufactured in one process, minimizing the number of thermal interfaces.
This contribution presents the development process leading to the ability to print tailored metallic porous structures using Additive Layer Manufacturing (ALM), the design and fabrication of a number of ALM heat pipe breadboards, and the results of a test campaign comparing the achieved performance with a copper-water heat pipe, a k-Core encapsulated graphite coupon and a flexible k-Core thermal strap.
The work is part of a research project concerned with the further development of a flight-proven CubeSat thruster with a size of 1 U. The thruster Power Processing Unit was redesigned to approximately double the system power, which also increased the thermal dissipation to 15 W, while keeping the size constant, reflecting the industry trend of steadily increasing power densities.
