Improving Thermo-Elastic Predictions

Thermoelastic predictions are often necessary in space technology developments, especially for satellites or other craft with highly-accurate sensors or optical instruments where the slightest movement or adjustment could render them unable to operate. 

Our current thermo-elastic predictive capability for how a spacecraft and its materials might distort or weaken leaves a lot to be desired, often using analysis rather than tests due to the highly unpredictable nature of space.

A new activity with TDE and Thales Alenia, Italy, has tried to improve these by better quantifying these uncertainties and providing guidelines and solutions to allow verification through testing.

The activity conducted large scale thermo-elastic tests in vacuum, with extensive instrumentation and a number of different test cases.

Using full field measurement techniques, such as infrared thermography and two different videogrammetry systems, including a camera in a pressurized canister with a rotating arm, the activity was able to develop a very large set of valuable data and make it available for future work.

By demonstrating that an end-to end workflow could be set up to efficiently run a large number of analyses the activity highlighted the need for further work, to correctly correlate the thermal and structural models.

A follow on activity with TDE is already under way, which will benefit all programs for which thermo-elastic is a potential issue.

T708-501MT completed at the end of 2020.