These slides were presented at the NAFEMS World Congress 2025, held in Salzburg, Austria from May 19–22, 2025.

Abstract

CubeSats are a class of small satellite constructed from 10cm3 cube units, where one or more units of cubes can be combined to make a satellite. The CubeSats are modular in nature and often exploit COTS components for the chassis and electronics. The CubeSats tend to be launched as secondary payloads which, combined with the modularity, can make them more affordable than conventional satellites. The space environment in which CubeSats operate have several extreme conditions which do not occur on earth, including vacuum, electromagnetic, radiation and thermal. The thermal environment that satellites need to survive includes extreme cold temperatures due to the vacuum of space, coupled with direct insolation and heat generating components with no convective cooling due to the vacuum environment. As such, Finite Element (FE) models of CubeSat designs are typically required to accurately assess the thermal performance of CubeSats. To design a CubeSat to meet its mission objectives, the CubeSat requirements can often conflict with each other and need to be balanced. For example, a CubeSat component may have a thermal envelope that requires a heater to meet, but this will affect the electrical power budget of the CubeSat. Therefore, the rapid assessment of the thermal performance of a CubeSat becomes highly desirable. However, building CubeSat thermal models is currently manual and time consuming and it was proposed that an automation process could be devised to expedite model development. The process was aimed at reducing the time it takes to create thermal CubeSat models, to improve the system design process. The ultimate aim is to completely automate the process such that optimisation algorithms can be used to optimise satellite designs to best meet their mission objectives. The Siemens NX CAD software alongside the integrated Simcenter simulation software was utilised for generating the model. The modular nature of most CubeSats meant that it was possible to build a library of common component level FEA models that could be used to assemble into an FEA model of the full assembly. This paper will describe the solutions developed to automate this process and discuss any future developments including the use of optimisation algorithms to aid the design process.