Numerical study of the spacecraft thermal control hardware combining solid–liquid phase change material and a heat pipe

A new spacecraft thermal control hardware composed of two parallel channels working for heat pipe (HP) and solid–liquid phase change material (PCM), respectively, is suggested for the high heat dissipating component which works intermittently with short duty. In present study the honeycomb structure radiator embedded with the device combining HP and PCM is designed, and the detailed thermal math models are developed for numerical analysis. The comparison of computational results between with and without PCM shows that the HP–PCM device redistributes temporal peak heat around a whole orbit period through alternate melting and freezing of PCM, and, as a result, the maximum and minimum temperatures are effectively alleviated. The drawback of PCM application due to low thermal conductivity can be successfully resolved by means of parallel arrangement of the HP channel. The suggested HP–PCM device can be a kind of off-the-shelf component and it does not require any case dedicated configuration. Therefore, it can be used with less impact on the program cost and schedule different from most of the PCM applications.