MAYA Heat Transfer Technologies Ltd

Published purpose

(20STDPK30) During the development of a spacecraft, a computer thermal model is developed to predict on-orbit temperatures and ensure that the spacecraft components will operate within an acceptable temperature range during all phases of the mission. This model is used both during design and after launch to ensure spacecraft safety during possible operational scenarios. Maya HTT's Space Systems Thermal software (using the Maya HIT TMG solver) is used worldwide by space agencies, prime contractors, and subcontractors, to develop high fidelity thermal models of spacecraft and their subsystems. Even though these models can be highly detailed, uncertainty in input parameters such as thermal contact resistances, optical properties (particularly after material degradation), and MLI effective emissivity, all lead to discrepancies between model predictions and measured or telemetry data. For accurate model prediction, it is very useful to find an optimum set of input parameters which drives the model to make predictions that correlate well with measurements. While some recent advances and demonstrations have been made in model correlation techniques, the computational overhead of varying many parameters to find an optimal set still prevents fast and effective model correlation. The most time consuming step of such a computation is computing the sensitivities of the correlation function to the different combinations of input parameters. In this project, we exploit a method of mathematics called adjoint-based sensitivity analysis to rapidly compute sensitivities to many design parameters, and utilize t those sensitivities to rapidly correlate a thermal model to temperature measurements.