High Conductive CFRP Sandwich Technologies for Platforms

A general trend in the design of Satellites structures is to use more and more extensively CFRP materials. These materials are lighter, stiffer and have a better dimensional stability than their metallic counterparts. However, the usually used CFRP materials have a low thermal conductivity, which makes the use of these materials difficult if not impossible for all parts that must conduct and distribute heat.For such applications, aluminium skin/core panels are often used for e.g. radiative structure panels. The goal of the study was to design, manufacture and test a CFRP spacecraft sandwich panel structure (based on a shear web supporting dissipative equipments) using high conductive CFRP in order to substitute common aluminium panels.