Speaker
Description
To meet customer’s needs, new payloads are needed such as digital payload. These payloads reshape totally the accommodation of S/Cs and thus the philosophy of its thermal control. The new dissipative units are more numerous and dissipative as well as often far away from cold source. This represents a new constraint for the design of future LHP product as the pipework is foreseen to be more complex to link an evaporator which would likely be inside the S/C toward the condenser which would likely be on the exterior side of the S/C.
The historic MAIT flow is not adapted to such applications. The design of the LHP routings and the needed MGSEs would indeed be very complex to ensure compatibility with a complex integration sequence of a LHP as a single block. The cost of such product is then foreseen to increase significantly, assuming it is still possible to design an LHP coping with all the constraints.
This study aims at defining the new approach needed to simplified the integration of capillary driven heat transport systems. The LHP use case has been used for this study.
The study has been discretized into 3 different phases.
- phase 1 : new LHP architecture have been proposed to ease integration sequence. This new architecture implements new components (valves & connections solutions). Existing On-The-Shelf components (COTS) have been traded off to selected those compatible with previous requirements.
- phase 2 has consisted to perform test on the selected components.
- During Phase 3 representative EM based on a LHP implementing the new architecture and the selected components have been tested and mounted on a MGSE representative of the most critical accommodation scenario encountered on real spacecraft.
The performance of the LHP have been tested before dismounting and mounting cycles and after to validate that the simplified integration does not hinder LHP performances. Three analyses were performed to validate the LHP performances and no impact have been measured on the LHP evaporation and condensation efficiency nor the internal heat leak from evaporator to reservoir
