12–14 Oct 2021
on-line
Europe/Amsterdam timezone

Characterization test of thermal heat leaks in electrical harnesses

12 Oct 2021, 13:15
30m
on-line

on-line

thermal analysis and software tools Thermal Analysis

Speaker

Maxime ANDRE

Description

The thermal heat leaks in electrical harnesses become one of the major source of uncertainty in space thermal engineering especially for miniaturized systems as nanosatellites, microsatellites or where harness lengths are reduced. In parallel, the space systems become more and more power consuming including more and more electrical needs leading to a high dissipated power and high electrical currents. Furthermore, the accommodation of these harnesses becomes difficult to thermally control in reduced volumes leading to several unknown heat leaks. In this kind of systems, and especially for thermal systems with a few of heating power available, these thermal heat leaks become one of the main heat exchange.

As the heat transfer inside the harness is quite complex (radiation and conduction involved) and as it exists a lot of harness types (various gauge, lengths, shielding, accommodation, MLI, etc…) then the thermal control design can be difficult leading to a large uncertainty philosophy and a system oversizing. In the frame of this difficulty, CNES has performed a thermal characterization test to catch the thermal behavior of harnesses in various configurations in order to understand the heat transfers involved and define a methodology to apply in system analysis. A finite element model is correlated based on test results and a nodal breakdown methodology is defined based on this correlation.

This paper gives the overview of this activity through the test and its results and presents the lessons learned.

Primary author

Presentation materials