Preliminary design of a mechanically pumped cooling system for active antennae

Date

7/12/2021

Journal Title

Journal ISSN

Volume Title

Publisher

50th International Conference on Environmental Systems

Abstract

The satellite telecommunications industry is currently undergoing significant evolutions. Future communication satellites need to accommodate a rapidly growing demand in data transfer, combined with more flexibility. For example, there is a strong need for Very High Throughput Satellites capable of delivering up to Tb/s over wide coverage areas and an active phased array antenna is a powerful enabler to achieve that. However, cooling of active antennas requires the use of a highly efficient thermal control system because it has many heat sources (hundred or more), high local heat fluxes (20W/cm� at evaporator interface), high overall dissipation (around 10 kW), and isothermal requirements on the amplifier chain. These conditions are very difficult to solve with current thermal control solutions (e.g. heat pipes or loop heat pipes), but require a two-phase mechanically pumped fluid loop (MPL). In a MPL, a pump circulates a fluid which evaporates when it absorbs the waste heat from the active antenna. In the EU funded IMPACTA project, a demonstrator for such a MPL is being designed and built. This paper describes the preliminary design for this demonstrator, including the fluid selection and tests on evaporator samples.

Description

Henk Jan van Gerner, NLR
Ramon van den Berg, Netherlands Aerospace Centre (NLR)
Johannes van Es, NLR
Anne Tailliez, AIRBUS Defence and Space
Andy Walker, ADS France
Cristina Ortega, AVS Added Value Solutions
M�nica Iriarte, AVS Added Value Solutions
Charlton Castro, AVS Added Value Solutions
ICES201: Two-Phase Thermal Control Technology
The 50th International Conference on Environmental Systems was held virtually on 12 July 2021 through 14 July 2021.

Keywords

two-phase, thermal control, ammonia, cooling, satellite

Citation