Radiation Shielding Study of Advanced Data and Power Management Systems (ADPMS) Housing Using Geant4

The tendency to reduce the spacecraft mass covers nowadays all components of the spacecraft. One potential target is to reduce the mass of electronics and its housings. The use of composite materials, especially CFRP is a well known and vastly used approach to mass reduction. In cost reduction the use of standard (non-space qualified) electronics has increased. These commercial circuits and other components cannot tolerate as high radiation levels as space qualified components. Therefore the use of standard electronics components poses challenge in terms of the radiation protection capability of the ADPMS housings. The main goal of this study is to give an insight on the radiation shielding protection produced by different configurations of CFRP wolfram laminates of epoxies and cyanate esters and then to compare them to the protection given by the commonly used laminates of aluminium. For a spacecraft operating in LEO and MEO orbits the main components of the space radiation environment are energetic electrons and protons, therefore in our study we will compare the experimental and simulation results of the radiation attenuation of different types of laminates for those particles. At the same time the experimental data has been used to validate the Geant4 model of the laminates, which can be used for future optimizations of the laminate structures.