ISS Crew Refrigerator Freezer Rack - Comparing EcosimPro and ESATAN Modeling

The Crew Refrigerator/Freezer Racks (RFR) are being developed and built at Astrium Friedrichshafen under ESA contract. The RFR will provide conditioned storage volume for astronaut food during transport in the MPLM and on board the ISS.

To support the design of the RFR a thermal model has been established at Astrium in the early project phase using the ESATAN software which is the ESA standard thermal analysis tool. This model has been extended to allow full operational simulation of the RFR during a typical mission scenario.

For demonstrating the capabilities of EcosimPro, a state of the art tool to address Environmental Control and Life Support analysis, the same model is built up with EcosimPro. The results are validated by comparing them to those from the ESATAN simulation.

Three simulation cases are investigated:

• steady state operation mode,
• 8 hours passive period with increase of ambient temperature from 30°C to 49°C and recovery,
• door opening every 3 hours for up to 30 seconds at ambient temperature of 30°C.