The thermal environment encountered in space by a multifunctional solar array

The design concept of multifunctional structures allows spacecraft to be more efficient. By creating structural components that can fulfil extra subsystem functions in addition to meeting structural requirements, mass and volume can be saved. The presented example of this is a wing solar array that contains the spacecraft's batteries. The batteries are commercial off the shelf components, used for their lower costs. The paper focuses on understanding the thermal environment and the response of the multifunctional structure to that environment. With this information, it is shown that the concept can be implemented in many orbits without any particular thermal control and that many more orbits could be used with thermal control of a suitable authority. Possible thermal control solutions are reviewed and recommendations for a passive system are made. © 2010 Elsevier Masson SAS. All rights reserved