Speaker
Description
Night resilience is an important point in the thermal management of any vehicle in Lunar or Mars surfaces. Arquimea has thermal control hardware for high and low temperatures, and solutions to decouple sink from components, securing the functionality of the components inside the lunar vehicle. These solutions, with TRL9 in both heat pipes (HP) and Loop Heat Pipes (LHPs), required new proposals to achieve the high demanding requirements needed in a Lunar vehicle.
In this presentation, a trade-off of different proposals to deal with the dust and the different requirements of the Moon, if in pole or equator, will be presented, taking special attention to Lunar night resilience. Introducing the requirements necessary for the design of a LHP.
A brief review of the design requirements in the Lunar surface will be compared to the solution selected for ExoMars Rover Module (RM) thermal control, where Arquimea developed 4 units, 2 of them integrated on the Service Module (SVM) and two of them on the Analytical Laboratory Drawer (ALD). This development, now in TRL8, was composed by radiators and Propylene LHPs with a passive regulation valve. Each LHP is designed to transport up to 50 W and operate at temperatures from -50 ºC to +55 ºC at the evaporator level and from -120ºC to +55 ºC at the condenser, the decoupling of these different levels was made by Pressure Regulating Valves, providing protection at cold Martian night.
