Designing an Accurate Temperature Control System for Infrared Earth Simulators Using Semiconductor and Air Cooling Integration

Abstract

In a laboratory environment, in order to test the attitude recognition capability and accuracy of the satellite attitude sensor—the infrared Earth sensor—the infrared Earth simulator is fixed on a five-axis turntable to enable multi-angle testing. In the past, the temperature control system of the Earth simulator was water cooled, which not only affected the working accuracy of the Earth simulator but also affected its size and portability and made it more difficult to use on the turntable. Therefore, we designed a cooling method for the cold plate based on semiconductor cooling technology combined with air cooling, and we designed a fuzzy PID control algorithm to accurately control the temperature according to this cooling method. In this article, we use SOLIWORKS to build the system model for the system and use the ANAYS Workbench to perform temperature analysis of the Earth simulator. The results show that the cold plate temperature can be maintained at 20.089 °C when the hot plate temperature is 85 °C. The overall temperature uniformity of the hot plate is better than ±0.3 °C, which meets the index requirements of the Earth simulator. We found that this cooling method can replace water cooling, giving the simulator the advantage of being miniaturized, and it can be adaptable to the turntable, which can be widely used in various sizes of Earth simulators and in various complex environments and operating conditions.