With lunar explorations on the horizon, including putting astronauts back on the moon by 2024, NASA is investing $2 million in cutting-edge thermal technology to make regulating temperatures during missions possible.
This technology will be developed by a team of researchers from Texas A&M, the Boeing Company and Paragon Space Development Corporation. The team is focused on creating shape-shifting technology to adjust thermal control systems automatically.
“Our proposed solutions incorporate shape-shifting metals that adjust their own heat rejection based on how hot or cold they are, so it solves the problem for us,” Dr. Darren Hartl said.
Hartl and his team have a successful history partnering with both Boeing and Paragon on shape memory alloy (SMA) technology. Most recently, Hartl and Dr. John Whitcomb have worked on an idea with Paragon to create a morphing radiator composed of SMAs.
Prototypes of the morphing radiator were developed by former graduate students Christopher Bertagne, now at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, and Patrick Walgren, current doctoral student. They successfully tested the prototypes in a small thermal vacuum chamber at NASA’s Johnson Space Center.
The funding from NASA, awarded through the Tipping Point initiative, will launch the SMA-based thermal control technology into its next phase.
Texas A&M will further develop the morphing radiator as well as the modeling and optimization of an accompanying thermal switch, also composed of SMAs. These thermally sensitive technologies represent uncharted territory, yet are critical to the operations of future space expeditions. “It will be another successful example of morphing structures enabling something that couldn’t have been done before,” Hartl said.
“It will be another example to the aerospace industry that you can have a structure adapt itself to its environment.”
FEATURED RESEARCHERS