In the paper several application techniques of MonteCarlo (MC) method applied to thermal analysis of space vehicles are presented. Although these methods are widely used in other engineering domains, their introduction to the thermal one is quite recent and not fully developed in the industrial practice.
This paper aims at showing that, even without demanding computation resources (all what presented has been obtained with a single processor PC) MonteCarlo analysis techniques, in a preliminary design phase, can support and integrate engineering judgment of the thermal designer. In particular, it is exploited the applicability of the method to reduced thermal models, with a clear advantage in terms of computation time. An original approach is proposed, and results are shown.
The papers shows the applicability of the MC method to the case when experimental data of the uncertain parameters are available, using the bootstrap re-sampling techniques. A third domain is the margin determination, using the queue definition. Finally, the MC tools are used as design instruments, and a design optimization is presented.