Speaker
Description
A thermal instrumentation study has been conducted for the 6 Tonne Large Space Test Chamber Loading Trolley housed at RAL Space. The loading trolley is a novel piece of equipment designed to suspend the Item Under Test in the chamber. Although the design of the trolley intrinsically minimises the conductive heat flow path to the IUT through the use of an insulating GFRP spacer at the interface, thermal regulation of the loading trolley is required to further conductively decouple it from the IUT. A thermal model of the chamber and loading trolley has been created using ESATAN-TMS, and the results of steady-state thermal analyses were used to determine suitable size and placement of heaters on the trolley structure. A total of 4KW of available heat power (including 2KW redundancy) was instrumented, with a mixture of closed and open loop control systems utilised. Thermal balance test cases were subsequently conducted at both cold and hot steady states, the results of which were correlated with the thermal model. This presentation outlines the thermal model methodology, practical aspects of thermal instrumentation, and thermal vacuum test results.
