Thermal Design and Optimization of Heat Pipe Radiator for Satellites

Satellite's thermal control subsystem (TCS) has to maintain components and structure within their specified temperature limits during satellite service life. TCS designers have to face the challenge of reducing both the weight of the system and required heater power while keeping components temperature within their design range. For a space based heat pipe radiator system, several researchers have published different approaches to reach such goal. This paper presents a thermal design and optimization of a heat pipe radiator applied to a practical engineering design application. For this study, a prospective communication satellite payload panel with applied passive thermal control techniques was considered. The thermal passive techniques used in this design mainly include multilayer insulation (MLI) blankets, optical solar reflectors (OSR), selected thermal coatings, interface fillers and constant conductance heat pipes. The heat pipe network is comprised of some heat pipes embedded in the panel and some mounted on inner surface of the panel. Embedded heat pipes are placed under high heat dissipation equipments and their size is fixed; minimum weight of the radiator is achieved by a minimum weight of the mounted heat pipes. Hence, size of the mounted heat pipes is optimized. A thermal model was built and parameterized for transient thermal analysis and optimization. Temperature requirements of components in both worst case conditions (Hot case and cold case) were satisfied under optimal sizing of mounted heat pipes.