Fully Coupled Hybrid Simulation of Spacecraft Thermal Structures

Everyone daily life relies more and more on spacecraft structures flying and orbiting through and outside the atmosphere. In the current practice, the development of spacecraft structures alternates modeling and testing phases conducted at the singular functional level. Such iterative virtualization process represents a design bottleneck when different functionalities are embedded into the same component and a synergic cooperation of as many developer teams is required. Hybrid Simulation, which is also known as Hardware-in-the-Loop (HiL) testing, has been extensively investigated in the pure mechanical domain and represents a very tempting approach for merging modeling and testing in a unique virtualization platform. The hybrid model of the emulated system combines numerical and physical subdomains and its dynamic response to a realistic mechanical and thermal excitation is simulated using a numerical time-stepping response history analysis. This paper summarizes the research conducted by the authors to extended hybrid simulation to spacecraft thermal structures.