Thermal management of GEO satellite communication payload

Thermal management is absolutely critical in geostationary satellites particularly in maintaining required thermal conditions in communication payload such as communication transponders components like High power TWTAs. If the required thermal conditions are not maintained, then it can adversely affect the performance of TWTAs and thereby satellite and hence communication. The requirement of Payload with higher capacity and power is growing exponentially hence thermal management is very critical and of utmost importance for space applications. The design, development and implementation of passive and active thermal management are carried in ISRO Geo missions. The paper deals with practical implementation of Passive and active thermal management system for GEO satellites. The Passive thermal control is implemented using Thermal grease, thermal paint, multilayer insulation, thermal filler materials, Heat pipes etc., The active thermal control is implemented using heaters and thermistor. Apart from these automatic temperature controller is implemented using embedded system with RTX 2010 microcontroller which takes care of whole spacecraft thermal management. The paper is organized as follows: The section I give the introduction. The section II of this paper describes the thermal design constraints. Third section deals with thermal management of the payload. The fourth section describes the automatic temperature controller. Brief description of the paper is given below.