Recent Improvements in the Thermal Analysis Environment

ESATAN/FHTS is the European Space Agency's Thermal Analysis system. Standard ESATAN provides full featured general thermal analysis capabilities and has been successfully used throughout the European space industry for over a decade. FHTS is the fluid loop extension to ESATAN, allowing the coupled thermal/hydraulic solution of thermal systems with embedded fluid loops. ESARAD is the European Space Agency's Thermal Radiative Analysis system which provides 3D shell model generation capabilities along with powerful, optimised calculation engines and full pre and post processing capabilities. All the tools have benefited from an ongoing enhancement program which has ensured that they fulfill the ever-expanding list of features requested by users.

Significant extensions and improvements to these tools have resulted in new releases of ESATAN/FHTS in February 1997 and ESARAD in July 1997. The main improvements being:

• VisualESATAN - a graphical user interface for ESATAN/FHTS.
• Further extension and validation of the FHTS features.
• Complete pre- and post-processing capabilities in ESARAD for radiative and thermal results, including ESATAN temperatures. This is available via 3D Visualisation and a new module which provides data export and 2D graph plotting.
• Improvement in flexibility of analysis approach in ESARAD through a specific analysis cases capability.
• Improved support for thermal models in ESARAD.

The paper details the recent developments to the software and summarises and further highlights the advanced capabilities of ESARAD through the description of a simple but complete analysis of an example satellite.