Fabrication and Characterization of Low-Mass and Flexible Heater for Lunar Applications
Abstract
The conducted study reports fabrication and characterization of lightweight, flexible carbon veil (CV) heaters as potential low-voltage thermal management devices for lunar applications. Flexible heaters are crucial in aerospace systems for controlling component temperatures, ensuring operational reliability, and removing moisture from instrument panels, spacecraft, and satellites operating under extreme environmental conditions. Conventional heaters, typically constructed from metals such as stainless steel, CuNi44, or Inconel 600, are limited by their high areal density and weight, restricted operating temperature ranges, and significant thermal expansion. The CV heaters proposed and tested here offer significant advantages over these conventional metal-based heaters, including low areal density (∼17 g/m2), negligible linear thermal expansion (1.5 × 10-6 K-1), high flexibility, and cost-effectiveness, making them ideal for extraterrestrial environments. Such properties can also address the transport challenges associated with delivering heavy metallic heaters from Earth to the Moon. The studied CV heaters were fabricated by integrating nonwoven carbon fiber CV mats with copper foil electrodes and coating the heaters with a thin film of water-repellent silicone layer, thus enabling rapid, uniform Joule heating. Thermal performance was evaluated under near lunar temperature conditions: ambient (24.5 °C), elevated (+120 °C, simulating lunar daytime), and subambient (-18 °C,…
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