Modular System Level Thermal Modeling

Common bus spacecraft development and constellations of spacecraft such as ORBCOMM have led to a need for common thermal models. For years, spacecraft design engineers have used common parts stored in a parts library to expedite the process of drafting the spacecraft in a CAD package such as Pro/Engineer. This methodology is implemented into the thermal modeling process for common parts used on one or more spacecraft. Using the previously developed Pro/Engineer parts library as the model template, the component thermal model is developed in FEMAP and translated into a complete thermal model using the TCON thermal software suite. The models are checked for accuracy at the component level to ensure that errors do not propagate to system level models. The result is a component level thermal model ready for integration into a system level model.

This paper describes the process of component level model development along with the integration of the component model into the complete spacecraft level model.