Speaker
Description
Extruded Aluminum grooved heat pipes are the most widely used components for the thermal management of spacecrafts, including high performance, high reliability level with large space flight heritage and market availability. This technology is designed and optimized to operate in micro-gravity and the gravity effects on Earth and during lunar or planetary missions significantly affect the performance of the grooved capillary wicks. With the aim of supporting the sub-systems or satellites acceptance testing on Earth as well as providing useful guidelines to design grooved-heat-pipe-based thermal buses for planetary missions, the proposed presentation intends to explain how to take benefits of the gravity to secure the aluminum grooved heat pipes operation. This analysis leads to discussions and operational guidelines to design efficient thermal buses based on Aluminum Grooved Heat Pipes (AGHP) in such environment. A technical solution is proposed and dedicated thermal test campaign has been realized to validate the proposed approach.
