Development of an active thermal control architecture for a closed fluid loop system

Abstract

The thermal control is necessary for both efficient operation of the satellite and its physical integrity. The reason is that all electronic components inside the satellite can operate at their optimum performance within a certain temperature. Furthermore, many of them have their lifetimes reduced by prolonged high temperatures. During the space missions, temperature inside spacecrafts is affected by heat absorbed from external solar and Earth radiation or heat generated from electrical and electronic components. Therefore, a thermal control is required to maintain the system temperature within a desired range and to ensure the requirements for spacecraft component operations to be met.

This research paper presents a thermal fluid closed loop control system developed by using MATLAB Simulink software with input data from NTU Satellite Research Centre. In addition, the knowledge of heat transfer such as conduction, convection and radiation are applied to efficiently design and simulate the system to obtain the simulation results. PID control algorithm is utilized to implement an active controller to improve the performance of the system.

The thermal control model presented in this paper showed a satisfactory performance since it can maintain the HX temperature stable at 288K with the optimal parameter settings.

Keywords: heat transfer, thermal control, simulation, radiator