A study on fabrication of monolithic lightweight composite electronic housing for space application

Abstract This paper dealt with an alternative approach of enhancing mass savings in spacecraft avionics design by replacing conventional aluminum alloy housing widely used for various spacecraft avionics with lightweight composite materials. For this purpose, key design requirements were defined to build up composite housing with various functionalities as well as more lightweight characteristics as compared with aluminum alloy housing. The proposed composite housing can be equipped with multiple electronics boards; and it can provide mechanical and electrical interfaces with ease. A fabrication process was also designed to overcome low machinability of CFRP and to minimize the post-treatment such as machining CFRP after curing. In addition, the composite housing with monolithic grid-stiffened frame was fabricated by co-curing through vacuum bag molding method. Its physical properties were also investigated with regard to launch environmental random load, stiffness, thermal conductivity, EMI protection. As a result, it was shown that the composite housing can have good performance comparable to aluminum and provide the mass savings over the aluminum housing having the same dimension. The proposed concept for composite electronic housing will be an effective alternative for lightweight avionics design for space application.