Design and experimental study of deployable radiator based on loop heat pipes

Deployable radiator is a radiation cooling device which is folded next to side wall of spacecraft while launching, and can expand itself after the spacecraft is on track. It can effectively improve the cooling capacity of the spacecraft. In this paper, the current research and development situations of the deployable radiator were studied and analyzed. Depending on this, design and simulation of the deployable radiator based on the loop heat pipe (LHP) was completed, and the experiment was verified in the vacuum environment. The result showed that the thermal experimental results and the thermal analysis data were in good accordance under hot case as well as cold case. Moreover, the temperature oscillations at the shell of the LHP evaporator and the outlet of saturated vapor and the condenser pipeline were found in the experiment. The phenomenon of temperature oscillations was eliminated experimentally by three measures, which included increasing the input heat load, heating the compensation chamber to control the temperature and cooling the compensation chamber.