Designing a Satellite Cryocooling System

This project puts forth a design for a satellite system which can cool a detector to extremely low temperatures while adhering to various technical constraints

Collaboration with Matthew Coomes, Konstantin Nelson, Devon Reber, and Rachel Simms.

Awards

  • 2nd Place Team, Aggies Invent Nuclear Security October 2021 (Press Release)

The goal of this project was to design a system that can cool a satellite based scientific instrument to 4 Kelvin. Our team’s solution was to use a combination of passive and active cooling to transfer heat away from the detector. I primarily worked on creating a proof-of-concept heat transfer model which demonstrated that, when combined with a radiative cooling system, a cryocooler could maintain the target temperature while remaining within the energy budget (slides 10 and 11). The chart shows that in the external temperature range of 285 K to 292 K, energy consumption stays well below the 28 watt limit shown by the green dashed line.

Aggies Invent is a 48 hour competition where teams of students compete to come up with solutions to real world problems. You can read more about it here.

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