THERMAL SIMULATION SOFTWARE BASED ON EXCEL FOR SPACECRAFT APPLICATIONS

In the early deveopment stage of the spacecraft program, it is desirable to establish thermal analysis results within a couple of minutes. Therefore, an in-house thermal simulation software (TSS) tool was developed to predict the temperature quickly and accurately. The TSS tool is not intended to replace the current commercial simulation tools for spacecraft thermal behavior. Its purpose is to allow fast assessment and comparison of technical solutions. In this study, a simple TSS tool model (7 nodes) was developed to execute quick trade studies, compare temperature, and compare computation time to that using ThermXL and SatTherm software tools. The TSS software provides satisfactory temperature results in significantly less computational time than ThermXL or SatTherm.