Light-weight radioisotope heater unit (LWRHU) impact tests

Details Light-weight radioisotope heater unit (LWRHU) impact tests Light-weight radioisotope heater unit (LWRHU) impact tests

Jan 1998

adsabs.harvard.edu/cgi-bin/nph-data_query?bibcode=1998aipc..420.1329r&link_type=abstract

Space technology and applications international forum - 1998. AIP Conference Proceedings, Volume 420, pp. 1329-1337 (1998).

Statistics

Applications

Furnaces, Heaters, Alpha Decay

Scientific paper

The light-weight radioisotope heater unit (LWRHU) is a 238PuO2-fueled heat source designed to provide one thermal watt in each of various locations on a spacecraft. Los Alamos National Laboratory designed, fabricated, and safety tested the LWRHU. The heat source consists of a hot-pressed 238PuO2 fuel pellet, a Pt-30Rh vented capsule, a pyrolytic graphite insulator, and a fineweave-pierced fabric graphite aeroshell assembly. To compare the performance of the LWRHUs fabricated for the Cassini mission with the performance of those fabricated for the Galileo mission, and to determine a failure threshold, two types of impact tests were conducted. A post-reentry impact test was performed on one of 180 flight-quality units produced for the Cassini mission and a series of sequential impact tests using simulant-fueled LWRHU capsules were conducted respectively. The results showed that deformation and fuel containment of the impacted Cassini LWRHU was similar to that of a previously tested Galileo LWRHU. Both units sustained minimal deformation of the aeroshell and fueled capsule; the fuel was entirely contained by the platinum capsule. Sequential impacting, in both end-on and side-on orientations, resulted in increased damage with each subsequent impact. Sequential impacting of the LWRHU appears to result in slightly greater damage than a single impact at the final impact velocity of 50 m/s.

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