Benefits of a Small Thermal Vacuum Chamber for Space Simulation

What is a small thermal vacuum chamber?

Thermal vacuum testing is a critical step in the design and qualification of space and flight components that are operating at high altitudes such as the mission-critical or sub-assembly components. It enables the component to be subject to space and upper atmospheric conditions – simultaneous altitude and temperature extremes. In a vacuum environment, heat is transferred through radiation or conduction since convection (transfer by air currents) is not possible without air. Thus, a thermal vacuum is a vacuum chamber that controls the temperature of the parts by conductive or radiant heat. This is easily accomplished with thermal platforms in smaller, portable systems.

Why Portable Space Simulation?

If you are testing or designing any high-altitude aircraft (e.g. spacecraft or aircraft) or anything leaving Earth’s atmosphere it’s important to consider thermal vacuum chamber testing to ensure your materials behave as designed. Unfortunately, space simulation systems are often sized remarkably larger than required due to a lack of foresight on what future requirements will be, This results in various inefficiencies. Thus, there are several cost-effective space simulation options; one of them being small thermal vacuum chambers.

A small portable space simulation chamber will meet the needs for testing many smaller components. The small size makes it more affordable and not something so expensive that you would need to take the devices to be tested to another facility at an hourly rate to perform testing. Pull downtimes for achieving vacuum are typically minutes instead of hours when using a small portable system. Likewise, temperature change rates are much faster.  Using the conductive nature of a thermal platform will always be faster than radiant methods typically used in larger chambers

Why use a TotalTemp Thermal Vacuum System?

If the above is enough to convince you that small thermal vacuum chambers are necessary, perhaps a couple more reasons:

• Logging to file and direct Network printing/logging of test results
• Easy Automation with the Synergy Nano controller
• Quality and reliability from years of experience in the field
• TotalTemp customer support is the best in the industry
• Better temperature control with a thermal platform instead of by radiant temperature control methods.

If you are testing spacecraft or aircraft components or anything that operates at high altitudes or in space, it is highly recommended that you use Total Temp Technologies’ small thermal vacuum chamber for testing.