Mapping nodal properties between dissimilar nodal representations of spacecraft structures using ESATAN- TMS - Application of thermal node property mapping to the design and analysis of the EarthCARE solar array plume shield

The EarthCARE satellite is designed to provide accurate measurements of clouds, aerosols, and infrared radiation emitted from Earth’s surface. As part of phase C of the design process of the EarthCARE solar array, the effect of the reaction control subsystem plume impingement needed to be verified by thermal analysis. Preliminary analysis had shown a plume shield was required to protect the solar array edge from reaching temperatures for which the structural integrety of panel substrate could not be guaranteed. A shield design without the use of thermal coatings was favored, as the use of coatings would require additional qualification tests to ensure chemical and thermal stability in the plume environment. However, due to the high plume fluxes, it proved difficult to define a design without coatings that lead to acceptable temperatures in the panel substrate. As the maximum plume flux and the plume flux distribution change over time, a detailed thermal analysis was performed taking into account these time-dependent and location-dependent plume fluxes. The contact zone calculation tool of ESATAN-TMS was used to map the flux data from the plume model onto the nodal distribution used for the thermal mathematical model. This led to a less conservative analysis, which allowed a design without thermal coatings to be defined that does not lead to critical panel substrate temperature temperatures. By performing the detailed plume analysis, additional qualification tests could be avoided. The applied method is generally applicable to the transfer of nodal properties from one nodal discretization to another.