Speaker
Description
With the growing interest in lunar missions during the last few years, the demand for technologies which allow hardware to survive the extreme conditions of the lunar night has increased. One promising approach is to enable high performance bi-directional thermal control in space applications.
Lunar Outpost EU has developed and tested an active thermal switch for this purpose. The device allows to actively change the thermal conductance between a heat source and a heat sink from a low to a high value. The thermal switch was tested in April 2023 and a new design iteration deduced based on the test results.
To describe system performance more accurately, a new method of calculating Turn Down Ratio (TDR) is being used to assess the performance of the switch in a representative environment.
