Thermal Management

Lithium-ion batteries are an integral part of energy storage systems used in NASA's Exploration program, as well as many modern terrestrial industries. NASA Johnson wanted a better way to measure total and fractional heat response of specific types of Li-ion cells when driven into a thermal runaway condition.

Our second INSIDER story today featured a new switching effect for thermal conductivity. Professor Patrick Hopkins and his colleagues discovered that a responsive protein from squid ring teeth contained properties supporting an on-and-off kind of thermal regulation. When the squid...

A highly miniaturized, MR-143, green monopropellant thruster was developed for 1N thrust. Testing indicated the initial catalyst bed heater was insufficient. In subsequent development, the thruster was equipped with a more efficient catalyst bed heater. For reliable ignition of the advanced, non-toxic,...

The inner workings of high-power electronic devices must remain cool to operate reliably. High internal temperatures can make programs run slower, freeze, or shut down. To address this issue, researchers have optimized the crystal-growing process of boron arsenide — a material that has...

As part of the continued thermal support for the Space Launch System (SLS) program, MSFC is constantly developing or modifying software tools to aid in analytical efforts to solve thermal issues and problems posed by the project. In some cases, existing software used by previous heritage programs provides an excellent...

Metal alloys, such as titanium alloys and steels, are known to have a good combination of mechanical properties for many structural applications, but these metal alloys do not meet the wear and corrosion resistance requirements for some structural applications. Titanium alloys, for example,...