ABSTRACT
Resistor networks are often utilized in the making of the mathematical model for predicting spacecraft temperatures during dynamic environmental changes of a typical orbit. The industry standard to date has been Thermal Desktop by CRTech. A thermal model of a spacecraft, for example, is created by making a collection of submodels that are each discretized into smaller elements solved by finite difference methods. These elements are treated as lumped capacitance masses connected by resistors, thus forming the R-C network. The resistors can represent the three heat transfer mechanisms: conduction, convection, and radiation, while the capacitors can be diffuse (have thermal mass), arithmetic (zero mass), or boundary. Using R-C networks in combination with common finite difference math solvers offers a robust and reliable method of handling highly complex and multivariate scenarios and offers the highest fidelity with the lowest number of computational resources, especially compared to popular CAD-based finite element analysis tools.
