European Methods for Thermo-Elastic Verification

Develop and benchmark methodologies for thermo-elastic verification and generate recommendationsfor benchmarks and guidelines for thermo-elastic verification by analysis and test, supported by the full European Space industry  

Almost every Scientific and Earth Observation spacecraft has stringent thermo-elastic stability/alignment requirements for the spacecraft. During the reviews of almost all of these projects many discussions on verifyng these requirements. The criticality and the complexity to verify compliance has become evident from projects like Herschel telescope, GAIA, Bepi Colombo and Solar Orbiter. There have been a number of activities on the topic of improvement of methods for thermo-elastic prediction and verification. Dissemination of the results of these activities has been limited due to the fact that parties were making their development in isolation from the rest of the European space community in combination with IPR issues. This proposed activity aims to support the European space community to establish the requested Europe wide accepted and verified methods for thermo-elastic verification and consolidate these in guidelines. The idea is therefore to gather a wide representation of the European space industry. The various methods used by the industry shall be collected and subjected to a benchmarking exercise. New methods shall be derived e.g. Through combining strong points of existing methods. A set of recommended methods supported with application guidelines shall be produced. These results shall be subjected to an external review by specialists from academia, industry and agencies who did not participate in the activity. As a conclusion of the activity all the methods, being the original ones and the newly developed ones, shall be applied to a demonstration case with the purpose to demonstrate the improvement of prediction results through application of the newly developed and therefore recommended methods. These predictions shall be verified by thermo-elastic test(s). The result shall be a consolidated and consistent set of documents containing: - Performance evaluation of the developed methods for thermo-elastic verification - Guidelines for the application of these methods supported by examples