From Event: SPIE Optical Engineering + Applications, 2018
Silver coated Teflon (SCT) has been used as a radiator material for spacecraft thermal control. In order to reduce the specular reflection, an attempt was made to roughen the heritage smooth SCT surface via sanding, leading to abraded surfaces. The objective of this study is to gain insight into the relative thermal performance degradation of smooth and abraded SCT radiator materials under identical exposure of concurrent UV irradiation and contaminant deposition. Contaminant molecules outgassed from representative spacecraft materials were deposited onto the smooth and abraded SCT samples with quartz crystal microbalances (QCMs) in close proximity to monitor real-time contaminant deposition. Thermal performance degradation is characterized by measuring solar absorptance () change on the SCT samples before and after contaminant film accumulation. Atomic force microscope (AFM) was used to examine the extent of surface roughness before and after contaminant deposition on smooth SCT samples. The preliminary findings indicate that less contamination accumulation was observed on SCT surfaces in comparison to the gold coated crystal surface of QCMs. In addition, the roughness of SCT surface appears to play a role in contributing a more pronounced change, suggesting the possibility of faster performance degradation of the abraded SCT materials in comparison to that of smooth SCT surfaces.
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De-Ling Liu, Jesse D. Fowler, Hyun Kim, Diana Alaan, Aura Labatete-Goeppinger, and Kelvin Cheung, "Effect of concurrent UV irradiation and contamination on silver-coated teflon radiator surface (Conference Presentation)," Proc. SPIE 10748, Systems Contamination: Prediction, Control, and Performance 2018, 1074803 (Presented at SPIE Optical Engineering + Applications: August 20, 2018; Published: 18 September 2018); https://doi.org/10.1117/12.2325028.5836454959001.