Physics-Informed Machine Learning Towards A Real-Time Spacecraft Thermal Simulator

Fuente: arXiv
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Main Authors: Oddiraju, Manaswin, Hasnain, Zaki, Bandyopadhyay, Saptarshi, Sunada, Eric, Chowdhury, Souma
Format: Preprint
Published: 2024
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author Oddiraju, Manaswin
Hasnain, Zaki
Bandyopadhyay, Saptarshi
Sunada, Eric
Chowdhury, Souma
author_facet Oddiraju, Manaswin
Hasnain, Zaki
Bandyopadhyay, Saptarshi
Sunada, Eric
Chowdhury, Souma
contents Modeling thermal states for complex space missions, such as the surface exploration of airless bodies, requires high computation, whether used in ground-based analysis for spacecraft design or during onboard reasoning for autonomous operations. For example, a finite-element thermal model with hundreds of elements can take significant time to simulate, which makes it unsuitable for onboard reasoning during time-sensitive scenarios such as descent and landing, proximity operations, or in-space assembly. Further, the lack of fast and accurate thermal modeling drives thermal designs to be more conservative and leads to spacecraft with larger mass and higher power budgets. The emerging paradigm of physics-informed machine learning (PIML) presents a class of hybrid modeling architectures that address this challenge by combining simplified physics models with machine learning (ML) models resulting in models which maintain both interpretability and robustness. Such techniques enable designs with reduced mass and power through onboard thermal-state estimation and control and may lead to improved onboard handling of off-nominal states, including unplanned down-time. The PIML model or hybrid model presented here consists of a neural network which predicts reduced nodalizations (distribution and size of coarse mesh) given on-orbit thermal load conditions, and subsequently a (relatively coarse) finite-difference model operates on this mesh to predict thermal states. We compare the computational performance and accuracy of the hybrid model to a data-driven neural net model, and a high-fidelity finite-difference model of a prototype Earth-orbiting small spacecraft. The PIML based active nodalization approach provides significantly better generalization than the neural net model and coarse mesh model, while reducing computing cost by up to 1.7x compared to the high-fidelity model.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2407_06099
institution arXiv
publishDate 2024
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Physics-Informed Machine Learning Towards A Real-Time Spacecraft Thermal Simulator
Oddiraju, Manaswin
Hasnain, Zaki
Bandyopadhyay, Saptarshi
Sunada, Eric
Chowdhury, Souma
Machine Learning
Computational Engineering, Finance, and Science
Modeling thermal states for complex space missions, such as the surface exploration of airless bodies, requires high computation, whether used in ground-based analysis for spacecraft design or during onboard reasoning for autonomous operations. For example, a finite-element thermal model with hundreds of elements can take significant time to simulate, which makes it unsuitable for onboard reasoning during time-sensitive scenarios such as descent and landing, proximity operations, or in-space assembly. Further, the lack of fast and accurate thermal modeling drives thermal designs to be more conservative and leads to spacecraft with larger mass and higher power budgets. The emerging paradigm of physics-informed machine learning (PIML) presents a class of hybrid modeling architectures that address this challenge by combining simplified physics models with machine learning (ML) models resulting in models which maintain both interpretability and robustness. Such techniques enable designs with reduced mass and power through onboard thermal-state estimation and control and may lead to improved onboard handling of off-nominal states, including unplanned down-time. The PIML model or hybrid model presented here consists of a neural network which predicts reduced nodalizations (distribution and size of coarse mesh) given on-orbit thermal load conditions, and subsequently a (relatively coarse) finite-difference model operates on this mesh to predict thermal states. We compare the computational performance and accuracy of the hybrid model to a data-driven neural net model, and a high-fidelity finite-difference model of a prototype Earth-orbiting small spacecraft. The PIML based active nodalization approach provides significantly better generalization than the neural net model and coarse mesh model, while reducing computing cost by up to 1.7x compared to the high-fidelity model.
title Physics-Informed Machine Learning Towards A Real-Time Spacecraft Thermal Simulator
topic Machine Learning
Computational Engineering, Finance, and Science
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2407.06099