Speaker
Description
Developed with support from the UK Space Agency, the Materials in Orbital Radiation Environments Database (MORED) tool aims to assists in the design of spacecraft systems when dealing with the impact of radiation on materials and electrical components in orbit.
Currently, the barrier to entry in terms of designing and putting a payload into space is decreasing. This allows for a wider variety of research and commercial opportunities, but these missions still require support from the established expertise from the space sector and related fields.
As we in Cerberus Nuclear, as relative newcomers to the sector, have found, many software and datasets made for the space sector are tremendously useful and accessible. Tools such as SPENVIS and OMERE cover many of the most important fundamental needs when considering radiation shielding, most obviously source generation but also simple shielding dose calculations. Past this point, more complex radiation transport codes using Monte Carlo are common.
MORED looks to build and expand on what these tools do not, covering how materials behave when exposed to radiation. This can be a very complex topic and one that branches out quickly due to the very large variety of available materials and the myriad of material properties that can be of interest.
As an example, take the polymer ABS, the Ultimate Tensile Strength of which actually increases upon exposure to Gamma radiation. Or the Polyimide Kapton, the absorption in terms of transmittance of 700nm wavelengths reduce from 85% to 62%.
Now, does this matter for all designs and missions? Not necessarily, as many missions may be short enough that these effects may not become apparent, or the dose required for significant change could be much higher than could be expected for a given low earth orbit. However, these property changes may become more apparent on longer missions or certain orbits and their effect on systems could be overlooked in design procedures.
Built using Power BI, MORED uses data sets from SPENVIS and collates research data from various journals to provide a centralised database that can be used to quickly check if a chosen material has any reported changes to its material properties when exposed to various types of radiation.
While still currently in a demo phase, the MORED tool is available on the Cerberus Nuclear website. The next stage of development will focus on increasing the materials and properties included in the database beyond the initial example cases currently included.
In addition, further work is being carried out on ensuring that the methodology behind the doses reported are clear. Unlike the ECSS standards for electrical components that provide clear reporting frameworks, the standards for material testing can be more varied. This work will be carried out in collaboration with a small selection of Master’s students on relevant university level courses of study as part of summer placements.
MORED also integrates the current electrical component dose sensitivity data reported in the ECSS standards to give users a convenient reference for early in the design process. Considerations are being made as to collecting further industrial data on rad-hardened components and reporting these in the tool to allow users to quickly find alternative components for at risk systems.
By quantifying these radiation related changes, risks, and limits MORED allows designers to predict changes over time that may compromise the performance of mission critical components. MORED seeks to encourage the design of robust and radiation tolerant spacecraft with increased operational lifespans in a variety of orbits.