Study: Development of a numerical model of the thermal behaviour of a CubeSat

Abstract

The thermal analysis of CubeSats is an essential part of the design of this type ofsatellite, but it is often difficult to achieve due to the need for expensive commer-cial software and the complexity of thermal modelling. In this study, a softwarespecialised on the thermal analysis of CubeSats is developed. This software allowsto easily define a CubeSat model and boundary and initial conditions, and thensimulates its internal thermal behaviour by taking into account thermal conduc-tion, contact conductance, and radiation. The results for a representative CubeSatmodel have been compared to those obtained with Thermal Desktop for an equiv-alent model, and the maximum temperature differences between both programshave been found to stay around 2 to 5◦C.