Instrument Thermal Engineering
Development of MATLAB data processing scripts (cut run-time by >90%)
Studied power implications of insulating spacecraft components
Cost/benefit analysis of independent solar shade for spacecraft
NASA Jet Propulsion lab — Summer 2014
MATLAB scripts
Thermal Desktop, a thermal analysis software package, has built-in data-processing that is cumbersome to use due to its run time, user interface, and display. For my group’s purposes, it was uninterpretable and unacceptable, so I developed a MATLAB package to read and process data from the binary files to which Thermal Desktop saves its simulation results.
Unfortunately, no documentation was available regarding the structure of the binary files. Nonetheless, by interpreting the Fortran source code Thermal Desktop uses to extract data from the binaries, I was able to develop user-configurable MATLAB scripts that could import, process, plot, and export thermal simulation data. The MATLAB scripts ran 1-2 orders of magnitude faster than the Thermal Desktop post-processing tools.
Power implications of component insulation
Without insulation, radiative heat transfer is dominant in space. Heating elements must be used to keep critical components within their operating temperatures. A simple on/off control scheme for such a heating element to keep a particular component within its operating temperatures was investigated in a Thermal Desktop simulation.
The simulation was set up with and without insulation surrounding the component and the results were viewed using the MATLAB package described above. It was found that both duty cycle and switching frequency of the heating element were significantly decreased in the presence of insulation, which leads to the conclusion that insulation can decrease power requirements and increase component life.
Costs & benefits of solar shades
Formation flying is a popular problem in spacecraft research. An interesting application of formation flying is that of an independent solar shade shielding a sensitive spacecraft from solar radiation. Without explicitly considering the practical difficulties of formation flying, I studied the thermal benefits of such a mission. Simulations were run in Thermal Desktop with a dummy spacecraft and a solar shade flying in formation while orbiting Earth, and the results were viewed using the MATLAB package discussed above. The shade provides considerable thermal stability for the spacecraft, but the feasibility of such a mission is another question.