Speaker
Description
Early stage thermal analyses are essential for mission feasibility studies, yet the commercial packages that dominate the industry (NX Thermal, ANSYS Thermal Desktop, Systema-Thermica, etc.) are costly, feature rich, and often complex to implement for conceptual design work. To bridge this gap, the Concurrent Engineering Centre at CNES has released the Integrated Design Model (IDM), a free, modular, and user friendly framework that lets thermal engineers build, size, and simulate a satellite’s thermal behaviour within minutes. IDM’s core, the IDM Editor, allows users to define spacecraft geometry, mass inertia data, material properties, and mission scenario, including orbit, attitude, power mode, articulation sequence, and ephemeris. Complementary modules (IDM CAD, IDM Scenario, and IDM View) provide rapid CAD integration, scenario management, and orbit visualisation, while a built in thermal add-on creates the Thermal Mathematical Model, solves the discretised heat balance equations, and delivers steady state and transient nodal temperatures together with automatic pre-sizing of radiators and heaters. To verify IDM Thermal’s results fidelity, CNES launched a second generation validation campaign on a complex model under similar constraints to the MicroCarb mission. Using similar geometry, material, and dissipation data, parallel simulations were performed in IDM and in Airbus’s proven tool Systema -Thermica. The comparison focused on incoming fluxes (solar, albedo, and Earth IR) computed with and without the same orbital ephemerides and nodal temperatures in the spacecraft structure . These results demonstrate that IDM can deliver accurate thermal predictions at a fraction of the cost and complexity, making early phase thermal feasibility studies accessible to the space community, especially start-ups and academia, such as university CubeSat teams, and other resource constrained programmes. Its STEP-TAS import export capability also ensures downstream integration with commercial solvers to enable detailed design refinement.