CubeSat Thermal Analysis using FEA in MATLAB

Greetings.

I am currently part of a university CubeSat project, in which I am in charge of thermal management of a nanosatellite throughout its flight.

In order to start presenting solutions to possible problems with temperature inside our structure, our goal is to simulate the flight (which will take part at around 25km over Earth's surface, as it will be a stratospheric flight) and thus, get a rough idea of the temperatures distribution all over our device. I aimed to do this using MATLAB, as I knew there was a FEM integrator in the Partial Differential Equations Toolbox which, I thought, would be enough for our purposes. Nevertheless, in our problem we need to take into account external radiation (albedo, infrared Earth's emissions, solar emissions...), heat conduction between structural elements, and also convection heat transfer between atmosphere and satellite.

As far as I know, MATLAB does not take into account all these parameters in the inbuilt functions for FEM applied to thermal analysis (createpde, ThermalModel...), but I am not completely sure. I would like to know if our problem can be studied using MATLAB, to which I am highly familiarised. Is there a way to implement general differential equations to solve using FEM in MATLAB? Or do we have to restrict ourselves to the existing differential equation implemented in MATLAB (i.e. the heat transfer parabolic partial differential equation), which I believe is not enough for us? Maybe we should try to use Simulink? Any suggestions and pieces of advice are more than welcome.

Thank you all very much for your time.

[Ravi Kumar]

Hi Jose,

You are right, the current thermal analsis in MATLAB PDE Toolbox cannot support thermal radiation between surfaces or solar radiation. Would you be able to reach out to me to provide additional details about your use case?

Regards,

Ravi