Sierra Nevada Corporation (SNC)

Design verification for the Dream Chaser cargo module

“Veritrek has enabled us to screen a large number of cases quickly and focus our detailed analysis on the driving design scenarios. It also provides us with quantitative data and rationale for selecting design solutions and satisfying requirements.” Stephen Miller, Dream Chaser Thermal Analysis Lead

Veritrek has enabled SNC to screen many cases quickly and identify the thermal design drivers for their Dream Chaser Cargo thermal model. As part of ISS docking requirements, the thermal team must verify that the module can stay within the allotted temperature requirements regardless of the orientation or position that the ISS is in. This requires data from hundreds of different cases, which would normally require the underlying Thermal Desktop model to be run several hundred times (taking weeks) and then an analyst to post-process all the run data to pull out the necessary verification information (another several days/weeks). By using a reduced-order modeling approach, these design verification efforts can be performed much faster and with more flexibility. Veritrek provided the team with quantitative data and rationale for selecting design solutions and satisfying requirements.  The Factor Sweep and Surface Plot Analysis features were used to sweep through different orientation and pointing angles to identify minimum and maximum temperatures, providing the team with information on which orientation/pointing scenarios would drive the thermal design efforts. Traditional methods could have been used and were used in the past, but they took significantly more time to obtain the desired results.

SNC’s traditional design verification efforts included building dozens of rough parametric sweeps plots (above) based on a handful of analysis runs; whereas SNC’s approach using Veritrek consisted of only a handful of 3D surface plots (below) based on thousands of data points. Optimal and suboptimal areas of the design space were found more easily and quickly.

Actual TD model and ROM data not available for public release. Representative example shown above.