Speakers
Description
Radian is a thermal analysis software conceived to provide agility to engineers, both at modelling and computing processes. It is accessible through a regular web browser and relies on a scalable network of computing resources in the cloud. This paper reports the advancements introduced over the course of 2026, in the user interface as well as in the simulation engine.
The most prominent new capability is the support of orbital mechanisms. Geometries can now move along the mission, either following a time series of rotations and translations provided by the user or tracking a celestial body such as the Sun. View factors, radiative exchange factors and environmental heat fluxes are handled as epoch-dependent series, and the Monte Carlo ray tracer only recomputes the configurations that actually differ, keeping the computational cost bounded. Environmental fluxes are now also stored per face, which improves the post-processing of shells exposed on both sides.
The parametric analysis feature has been widened. Beyond material and optical properties, variations can now target geometry thickness, mass, boundary conditions and scenario parameters, and solar and planetary flux computations are distributed as parallel tasks over the cluster. Mission definition has been enriched with operational modes, which group heater and dissipation states and bind them to mission events, and with a generalised pointing attitude with configurable primary and secondary vectors and additional target bodies. Heliocentric orbits are now supported as well.
On the computing side, periodic solutions can be paused, inspected iteration by iteration and resumed from the stored temperature field, and the memory footprint of the ray tracer has been reduced substantially for large models. Interoperability has progressed with an importer for ESATAN-TMS geometry, linear and convective conductors, and with the extension of the STEP-TAS importer to carry the thermal mathematical model alongside the geometry.