Surrogate models to support thermal engineering

To identify the most promising activities in the thermal engineering domain that could benefit from the use of surrogate models and to develop a prototype implementation of thetechnology allowing its impact to be thoroughly assessed.

Space thermal engineering relies heavily on numerical models and test data for thedesign and verification of products and vehicles. However, the numerical models canrequire too much computing resources to be effective for certain activities, such asdesign optimisation or worst-case assessment. The use of surrogate models tosupport these kinds of activities is common in other industrial sectors; however, thespace environment presents some difficult challenges. Involving expertmathematicians, supported by thermal engineers, would address an existingcapability gap. The proposed contractor ThinkTank Maths have an agnosticapproach which can provide a much-needed fresh look, and which has producedgood results on a related problem for ESA in the past.;The activity will carry out, at minimum, the following tasks:? Together with the agency, consolidate and prioritise user requirements andidentify most promising candidate scenarios for development. Preliminary toplevelcandidates could be: supporting worst thermal case assessments,optimisation of key aspects of the thermal design; post-test thermal modelcorrelation; assessment and development of model order reduction techniques;and controller design.? After selection of the use cases to address, the contractor shall trade-off the mostpromising technologies to answer them. This may include the use of existingtechniques, or, considering the background of the company, novel approachesdeveloped from first principles.? Develop a prototype implementation of the chosen technology and apply it to thechosen industrial use case, draw conclusions and recommendations for apossible follow-on.Pending successful conclusions, a potential follow-on activity would advance thetechnology maturity to a commercial product to be commercialised via the companyor together with a partner (e.g. tool developer, software house).