“Ultra-Low Temperature Thermal Shroud for Instrumentation Testing”
Ryan LaMonica, S.B. ’18, mechanical engineering
Advisor: John Dykema, Project Scientist
Atmospheric research missions involve a huge amount of up-front capital investment, so it is important for scientists to know the instruments they are sending into the stratosphere will work the way they are designed under such harsh environmental conditions. To help scientists test their instruments, LaMonica sought to develop an affordable thermal shroud that can simulate stratospheric conditions of negative 60 degrees Celsius. He installed a series of densely compacted copper tubes around the outside of the shroud, running chilled fluid through the tubes to keep the shroud’s internal temperature in the proper stratospheric temperature range. LaMonica designed the shroud to interface with an existing chiller unit and fit into a vacuum chamber that would be used to test LiDAR equipment at atmospheric pressure levels similar to those of the stratosphere. Future work could give researchers a useful tool when designing parts and sub-systems that will operate in harsh atmospheric environments.
“The biggest challenge during this project was to make informed design decisions based upon the trade-offs between multiple design criteria,” he said. “I found there were so many unknowns at the beginning of the project that the best course of action was to establish a few constants off which to base further analysis, then adjust the initial assumptions as needed based on the results of the final analyses. This seemed to work best when considering many open-ended design variables.”