Thermica

Thermica is a plug-in application of the Systema environment. Its applications transform the geometric model into a mathematical model made of nodes and perform a complete thermal analysis of an object in its environment.

Advanced multi-threaded Monte-Carlo Ray-Tracing algorithms allow a fast computation of external fluxes from the Sun and the planets (Albedo and IR), the aero-thermal flux of the residual Earth atmosphere for altitudes above 100 km and radiative couplings.

An innovative Airbus DS method, the Reduced Conductive Network, computes consistent conductive couplings with external and radiative fluxes hypothesis. This 2^nd order algorithm improves significantly the accuracy of conductive heat transfers.

Thermica may be used from early phases to test and operational correlations. It takes into account shell and solid geometries designed in Systema and may also rely directly on CAD shapes.

Complete physical properties can be set:

• IR thermo-optical properties (emissivity, specularity, transmission) with possible wavelength or incident angle dependencies
• Solar-spectrum thermo-optical properties (absorptivity, specularity, transmission) with possible incident angle dependencies
• Bulk properties within one or two layers (heat capacitance, density, conductivity) with possible temperature dependencies

Thermica is particularly adapted to simulate the thermal behavior of a spacecraft in orbit and, more generally, to any thermal analysis that requires an accurate modelling of the radiative aspects.

Thermica also offers a direct link to temperature solvers such as Thermisol or ThermiCalc.