To leverage modern digital engineering techniques to overcome inefficiencies in the current thermal engineering and analysis process

Digital engineering tools have been used by space thermal analysts for decades, in particular the core modellers, and thermal/radiative kernels used in every space project. However, many parts of the thermal engineering and analysis process are still manual, data exchange is not standardised. Often these parts of the process lie between different main activities, or occur when pure ?thermal analysis? meets adjacent disciplines. Today this is done in an informal way, often without linking to actual S/C telemetry.Digitalisation is needed to exchange, for example, data for thermal testing (e.g test plans, configurations, measurement data), data from other disciplines, (e.g. electrical power dissipation) or where no standardised approach exists to exchange relevant data (requirements, budgets, product tree, etc.). The most critical areas where digitalisation can support the thermal analysis process will be addressed to improve the robustness of data exchange, avoiding costly errors, whilst permitting richer data sources to be used - by virtue of simpler integration with analysis tools. The activity will develop software prototypes, data models and possibly contribute to standards in the domain. It is recognized that some processes are specific to a given company. Any developed process improvements shall take advantage of open standards and technologies and focus on methods ? rather than tools ? that could be implemented by all organisations. The activity aims to explore other aspects of digitalisation beyond efficiency improvements, as to use machine learning methods or to exploit hitherto unused data sources ( for example, during a thermal test, utilisation of data from the functional testing, ambient testing or flight). Such opportunities are enabled by having robust description of data sources and data exchange pipelines.The activity encompasses the following tasks:- Critical assessment of thermal engineering process to identify potential improvements through digitalisation.- Elaborate the most promising technological options and develop prototype implementations.- Implement a demonstrator to showcase the developed prototypes and demonstrate the benefits. - Disseminate the results to the European Space Thermal Analysis Community