A review of water sublimation cooling and water evaporation cooling in complex space environments

Abstract

With the lunar base, crewed Mars exploration and other future exploration plans proposed, the thermal control system of spacecraft will face challenges such as significantly higher thermal load and more complex and variable thermal environment. Traditional radiant heat sinks can hardly cope with the more demanding heat rejection requirements brought by these challenges, and more efficient, reliable and robust heat sinks are urgently needed to ensure the smooth running of future exploration programs. The sublimation or evaporation cooling technology has great potential to respond to these potential thermal control challenges. They utilize the latent heat of phase change from sublimation or evaporation of the consumable working medium into the space environment to reject the waste heat generated by the crew or equipment inside the spacecraft. This paper presents a review of the research progress in recent decades around two typical consumable heat sinks, the water sublimator and the water membrane evaporator. It mainly covers the basic issues and recent advances in component configuration, analytical and computational methods, experimental research methods, and system application architecture. The remaining problems and potential solutions in the development of water sublimator and water membrane evaporator as well as the direction of future development are summarized and pointed out.