Perovskite manganese oxide-based superposed multilayer film with high emittance tunability for smart radiation devices

Abstract

Smart radiation devices (SRDs) with the ability to switch emittance according to the radiator surface’s temperature are significant for spacecraft thermal control on exploration missions with drastic changes in thermal environments. However, it is quite urgent to improve the performance of the intelligent thermal control films in SRDs due to the limitations such as low emittance tunability and inappropriate phase transition temperature. Consequently, a film with self-adaptive infrared emittance based on anti-reflective design is proposed in this paper. The main structure is a superposed multilayer film based on a doped perovskite manganese oxide La0.825Sr0.175MnO3 (LSMO) and BaF2 stacks. The emittances of the designed multilayer film are 0.18 and 0.83 at the temperatures of 100 K and 295 K, and therefore the emittance tunability achieves 0.65. Compared with single-layer LSMO, the emittance tunability has increased 25 % approximately. The enhancement in emittance tunability can be explained by the fact that multilayer films with staggered low and high refractive index dielectric layers may cause destructive interference and suppress the Fresnel reflections at high temperatures. In addition, the thickness of dielectric part is carefully designed to avoid the formation of high emissivity Fabry-Perot (FP) resonance when LSMO switches to metallic state at low temperatures. This perovskite manganese oxide-based multilayer film exhibits remarkable intelligent thermal control properties. It provides a significant opportunity to improve the performance of SRDs and a promising potential for maintaining the optimal operating temperature of the spacecraft.