Abstract: The requirement and typical application of graphite materials with high thermal conductivity in spacecraft were summarized. High thermal conductivity flexible graphite film can be used to improve the thermal conductivity of the complex or as a flexible thermal strap. Thermal louvers can be used for heat dissipation of high-power components or electronics. Aiming at the application bottlenecks of existing flexible thermal conductive materials such as poor flexibility, small size, and thin thickness, a new type of flexible graphite film with high thermal conductivity was promoted and developed. Graphitic films with wrinkles at surfaces were prepared by mechanical rolling using graphitic bubble as precursor which derived according to “solid foaming” method. Subsequently, millimeter-level thick tape with thermal conductivity above 750W/(m·K) were fabricated based on thermoplastic processing. Furthermore, the tensile strength of this thermal conductive tape was elevated from 6 MPa to 20 MPa while the dimension can be extended under mechanical stress. Applying the flexible graphite film to the large-scale load installation structure of the spacecraft, the temperature gradient is reduced from 8.9°C to 2.5°C, which can effectively improve the equivalent thermal conductivity of the spacecraft's low thermal conductivity structure. High thermal conductive graphitic blocks were prepared by hot-pressing method. Then graphite products as thermal louvers were completely coated with metal layer in order to prevent the graphite particle at surface from peeling off, which was successfully applied to heat dissipation of a high-power solid-state memory device for satellite.

Key words: spacecraft, thermal control, thermal louvers, graphite materials, temperature difference, thermal conductivity