Carbon-carbon thermal doublers for spacecraft

You are here: Homepage > Search

Carbon-carbon thermal doublers for spacecraft

Rawal, S.P. / Rasbach, C. / Shih, Wei

Low modulus (<=28 GPa) carbon-carbon (C-C) composite plates have been successfully fabricated to obtain thermal conductivity nearly equivalent to aluminum. Bonded between a stiffened composite structure and high power electronic box, the low modulus C-C provides a compliant thermal doubler to spread heat to the panel. In particular, a few low modulus 2D 0.020-in. thick C-C plates have been successfully used as thermal doublers on the Mars Global Surveyor and Mars '98 spacecrafts. The 2D C-C doubler offers through-the-thickness thermal conductivity of approximately = 40 W/m-K, and the low modulus 3D C-C doubler offers nearly isotropic thermal conductivity of approximately = 180-200 W/m-K. A thermal simulator composite panel and 2D and 3D C-C doublers were fabricated and tested in the thermal vacuum chamber to validate the thermal performance. Subsequently, both the 2D and 3D C-C thermal doublers have been used on the Stardust spacecraft. Specific details of the C-C thermal doubler development, test, and integration effort are discussed in this paper.