Abstract
The north and south panel of a geostationary satellite are used for radiator panels to reject internal heat and utilize several heat pipe networks to control the temperatures of units and the main structures of satellite within proper ranges. The design of these panels is very important and essential at the conceptual design and preliminary satellite design stage, so several thousands of nodes or more are utilized in order to perform detailed thermal analysis of panel. Generating a large number of panel nodes takes time and is tedious work because the nodes can be easily changed and updated by locations of units and heat pipes. Also the detailed panel model can not be integrated into spacecraft thermal model due to its node size and limitation of commercial satellite thermal analysis program. Thus development of a program was required to generate a detailed panel model, to perform thermal analysis and to make a reduced panel model for the integration to the satellite thermal model. This paper describes the development and the verification of the panel thermal analysis program with its main modules and functions.
