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 continued the development of the active thermal switch (ATS). The compact device allows to actively change the thermal conductance on-demand between a heat source and sink from a low to a high value and vice-versa.
A new version of the active thermal switch was tested in summer 2024. Based on the design changes carried out it was possible to improve the main performance characteristics. Additionally, further technical improvements were identified.
To describe the system performance more accurately, the novel method of calculating the Turn Down Ratio (TDR), which was presented during the ESTEW2023 is being used.
