Abstract
An effective estimation method of thermal contact resistances (TCRs) in a satellite thermal model is presented. In a general satellite thermal design, the accurate values of TCRs are initially unknown and must be determined to make the thermal model be consistent with experimental results. This determination process usually needs large cost because the appropriate TCRs have to be searched by try-and-error approach. In the presented method, the estimation of the TCRs is effectively performed by using the ensemble Kalman filter (EnKF), which can automatically provide optimum estimations of system state variables while assimilating the numerical model with the experimental one. By setting the TCRs to be the state variables in the satellite thermal model, the optimum estimations of the TCRs can be obtained as outputs of the EnKF. A numerical example of a simple small satellite is provided to verify the effectiveness of the presented method.
