Speakers
Description
The thermal control of satellites requires technologies that can effectively heat sensitive areas, while alleviating the constraints associated with this need.
Nowadays each piece of equipment or subsystem may require one or even several heating lines, which imposes constraints such as:
- Need to multiply the lines in order to guarantee a certain temperature homogeneity
- Each line requires thermistors and connectors as well as the bandwidth associated with the signal levels (TM/TC, etc.).
- The choice of line control (ON/OFF, PID, etc.) must be chosen, challenged and validated,
- In the case of the use of a mechanical thermostat, the lifetime constraint must be assessed and justified,
- Depending on the criticalities, the lines can be redundant in order to avoid prohibitive failures.
Therefore, the development of a flexible passively self-regulating heater would greatly reduce the efforts of thermal regulation. This innovative type of heater is based on the PTC (Positive Temperature Coefficient) effect. The small company Heatself has already proven the effectiveness of this phenomenon by developing flexible 1D self-regulating heaters (heating cables). This work deals with the proof of concept of a new 2D flexible self-regulated heaters with a direct application as passive smart thermal control of electronic units inside the satellite. The paper presents the physical and operation principle of the technology, the prototyping phase and the functional and operational testing in simulated space environment.
