Tuesday, October 05, 2004

Intelligent Thermal Vacuum Chambers

In this invitation to bid from ESA, they seem to have a need for a way to accelerate thermal testing. In their words,

Modern spacecraft require lightweight solar arrays capable of withstanding either at least a thousand very deep thermal cycles in Geostationary orbit (GEO), or several tens of thousands medium thermal cycles in low earth orbit, or high range temperature thermal cycles for space missions to the sun vicinities (e.g. Bepi Colombo, SOLO, etc.). Extensive tests on solar array samples have to be performed in order to ensure that mission requirements will be met. The objective of the activity is to procure an accelerated thermal cycling facility with the required characteristics to fully cope with the thermal cycling test conditions defined for LEO, GEO and close to the sun missions, with the additional ability of performing short duration cycles, so the testing time for qualification and evaluation programmes can be considerably reduced.

Maybe a way to do this is through better analysis while the testing is being performed ? Maybe an idea would be to allow for the chamber to be intelligent about the actual thermal cycle the payload has to go through ? Imagine that, Intelligent Thermal Vacuum Chambers ...

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