International. Some space travel requires nuclear-powered engines, and in such cases the problem of unwanted heating can be critical and require powerful, highly efficient cooling. Heat from the engine needs to be diverted into outer space in the form of radiation.
The traditional approach to this problem was to pass a heat transfer fluid through pipes in radiator panels fixed to the spacecraft's hull, allowing excess heat to be released into space. But such radiators are usually large and heavy, and do not possess any protection against meteorites.
A group of scientists from the Moscow Institute of Physics and Technology (MIPT) have a new solution: a refrigerator/droplet emitter. The fluid in this system, which looks like a shower, does not circulate in the pipes, but is sprayed in outer space, one off the heat and then picking it up and recycling it. This way the fluid cools much faster (due to a larger drip surface area), and the hardware is lighter in weight and more durable – a meteoroid shot through the fluid cannot damage the cooling system.
However, the idea of droplet cooling used to be seen as something that had no future, mainly because of this problem: the droplets of the heat transfer liquid (due to the effects of solar radiation, particles in the ionosphere and other factors) are electrically charged and begin to disperse in different directions, which prevents them from falling into the receiver. Thus, the droplet cooling system was seen as inadequate for space technology.
They created a software package to calculate the parameters of the cooling systems in the spacecraft's high-powered engines. They devised a numerical description of the outer part of the system, where fluid circulates in open space, something they considered vitally important to assess the effect of dispersion and find a way to compensate for it. To this end, the staff in our laboratory created a special set of programs to simulate real flight conditions in outer space.
The development of the new system was not limited to mathematical modeling - scientists created special facilities to simulate the real conditions of a spaceflight, and carried out a series of tests. The results have shown that the proposed solution works. The next step is rehearsal in space.
