ATA Engineering

Design optimization of SmallSat radiator sizes

Thermal engineers at ATA Engineering used Veritrek to optimize the body-mounted radiator design on one of their SmallSat buses. This design consisted of 6 different radiators on five different sides of the SmallSat bus. The thermal design consisted of body-mounted radiators to effectively dissipate heat in hot conditions to keep 5 electronics boxes below a maximum temperature, and heaters that would distribute heat in cold conditions to the same 5 electronics boxes to keep them above a minimum temperature without going above a certain survival heater energy threshold. Veritrek’s Optimization Analysis helped streamline this balancing act and filter down to an optimized size for all 6 radiators that keeps everything within mission requirements. Traditional methods could have been used by plotting out the edges of the design space, interpolating between, and performing manual guess and check runs to find the best solution; but Veritrek provides a complete picture of the entire design space with tens of thousands of data points. Without Veritrek, a best solution would have been chosen out of ~10 options as opposed to tens of thousands of options. Download the publication for more information.

Choose an optimal solution from a handful of options using traditional methods (above) or from tens of thousands of options (below).

Veritrek’s Optimization Analysis plots out a design envelope for two output responses at a time, with tens of thousands of different design points. These design envelopes can be generated for all outputs of interest and filtered down to the best solution.