Surrogate models to support thermal engineering
Programme
TDE
Programme Reference
T721-B17MT
Prime Contractor
THINKTANK MATHS LIMITED
Start Date
End Date
Status
Closed
Country
United Kingdom
Objectives
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 the
technology allowing its impact to be thoroughly assessed.
Description
Space thermal engineering relies heavily on numerical models and test data for the
design and verification of products and vehicles. However, the numerical models can
require too much computing resources to be effective for certain activities, such as
design optimisation or worst-case assessment. The use of surrogate models to
support these kinds of activities is common in other industrial sectors; however, the
space environment presents some difficult challenges. Involving expert
mathematicians, supported by thermal engineers, would address an existing
capability gap. The proposed contractor ThinkTank Maths have an agnostic
approach which can provide a much-needed fresh look, and which has produced
good 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 and
identify most promising candidate scenarios for development. Preliminary toplevel
candidates could be: supporting worst thermal case assessments,
optimisation of key aspects of the thermal design; post-test thermal model
correlation; 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 most
promising technologies to answer them. This may include the use of existing
techniques, or, considering the background of the company, novel approaches
developed from first principles.
? Develop a prototype implementation of the chosen technology and apply it to the
chosen industrial use case, draw conclusions and recommendations for a
possible follow-on.
Pending successful conclusions, a potential follow-on activity would advance the
technology maturity to a commercial product to be commercialised via the company
or together with a partner (e.g. tool developer, software house).
Application Domain
GEN-Generic Technologies
Technology Domain
21-Thermal
Competence Domain
2-Structures, Mechanisms, Materials, Thermal
Initial TRL
TRL 2
Target TRL
TRL 4
Achieved TRL
TRL N/A