Technical Paper
Thermal Test of the Active Fluidic Cooling Unit of ATV
2003-07-07
2003-01-2422
The Equipped Avionics Bay of the Automated Transfer Vehicle is thermally controlled by means of ten Active Fluidic Cooling Units (AFCU), each of them being composed of four Variable Conductance Heat Pipes (VCHP). In spring 2002, a thermal test in vacuum chamber has been performed with one AFCU subsystem. The objectives were: To characterize the thermal behavior To tune the control architecture To validate the AFCU modeling This paper deals with the set-up, the means and the sequence implemented for this test and the main results obtained from test measurements and exploitation.
