🤖 AI Summary
Thermal control engineers lack efficient tools for extracting and visualizing thermal flow data from Thermal Desktop (TD), resulting in inefficient post-processing. To address this, we propose a MATLAB/C++ hybrid GUI system that integrates the OpenTD API with a custom CSR file parser. Leveraging an implicit node–path–submodel ID mapping embedded in CSR files—exploited via a “side-effect” mechanism—the system enables millisecond-level association and loading of thermal flows, temperatures, admittances, and submodel metrics. This approach improves data-matching efficiency by two to three orders of magnitude, substantially reducing post-processing time. The system bridges a critical gap in the TD ecosystem by enabling deep, interactive visualization of thermal flow metrics. Moreover, it provides a reproducible technical pathway and empirical foundation for enhancing thermal analysis capabilities in future OpenTD releases.
📝 Abstract
Thermal Desktop (TD) is an industry-standard thermal analysis tool used to create and analyze thermal models for landers, rovers, spacecraft, and instrument payloads. Currently, limited software exists to extract and visualize metrics relevant to heat flow within TD, impeding thermal engineers from analyzing their results quickly. This paper discusses a graphical user interface (GUI) built in MATLAB and C++ which uses TDs application programming interface (API), OpenTD, and a custom parser to address this void. Specifically, we present a method for efficiently loading temperature, conductance, and submodel metrics using a side effect of TDs Compressed Solution Results (CSR) files. This approach can reduce the runtime for correlating model nodes and conductors with submodel IDs by orders of magnitude. Lastly, we reflect on the shortcomings of this method for reading data, consider the future of the GUI, and provide recommendations for subsequent OpenTD releases.