Sensitivity analysis and uncertainity quantification of thermal model for data processing unit dedicated for nanosatellite space missions

In the paper a sensitivity analysis (SA) and uncer-tainty quantification (UQ) were used to analyse and verify the thermal aspects of the prototype design of the Intuition-1 cubesat Data Processing Unit (DPU). Prepared thermal mathematical model was used to perform the SA and UQ. For the analysis, two major goals are indicated: firstly, identify and eliminate less important parameters from further analysis, secondly taking into account the epistemic and aleatory uncertainties in the UQ study for discovering the lower and upper bounds of outputs variability. The collected results showed that the analysed stage of design of the Intuition-1 DPU does not require further modification. This conclusion was supported by the fact that the determined temper-atures did not exceed the operational limits for the device. It was also shown that minimizing the uncertainty of inputs can reduce the overall uncertainty of obtained results, contributing to greater credibility of the thermal design. The presented methodology can be applied to many other products to identify the importance of individual design parameters and predict uncertainty of key responses under mixed aleatory and epistemic one. The obtained results provided valuable information supporting space project decisions and were important for robustness of the thermal design.