Materials with
memory capable of modifying their shape could revolutionize the
design of these components.
One of the main
problems facing the designers of any spacecraft is the control of
their temperature. To do this, both systems capable of generating
heat are used to prevent them from freezing as radiators to remove
excess heat, something especially important in ships that are in
orbit around a star and that at times they are in the shade and at
times they receive from Full of sunlight.
But a team at NASA's
Goddard Space Center is working on shape-shifting radiators that
could serve both to absorb and eliminate heat. The idea is to use
materials "with memory" that change form according to their
temperature and thus develop a radiator capable of bending and
stretching. Thus, the deeper the folds, the more it will be able to
absorb heat; On the contrary, the more stretched and less deep the
bends, the more it will be able to remove heat.
The team also seeks
to increase the effectiveness of origami radiators by covering them
with vanadium oxide, a compound that as soon as it reaches 68 degrees
Celsius undergoes a change of state that makes it become more
efficient dissipating heat, although they are looking for the way to
do That the change occurs at a lower temperature, probably by doping
with other materials.
By combining the two
techniques, the project team believes that they will be able to
create very small yet effective radiators, devices that will be
especially interesting for small ships like the CubeSat, which can be
as small as a 10cm cube; With such a small size the traditional flat
radiators are very ineffective.
There is still time
for the technology to be developed enough to test it on a satellite,
but if it works, and as is often the case, it could have very
interesting applications on the ground. One, for example, would be
the dissipators of computer processors, especially in the case of
graphics cards, which increasingly have larger and larger radiators.
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