Abstract
Space is one of the most mysterious and unexplored places for humanity. It has a dangerous environment that critically affects everything that is launched there. In this case, an enormous challenge for engineers now is to find cheap but effective manufacturing methods that can provide an instrument that is stable during launch, landing, and work time of the mission. Additive technologies are a credible method for this task. It can provide materials that are stable in the big range of temperature, vacuum, and stresses.
Unfortunately, some of the instruments need high precision of the surfaces that could be damaged during the mission. The mass spectrometer is one of such devices. One of its main parts is the ion trap that extremely sensitive to a displacement of the surface. Our perspective mission is on Moon Polar Caps, where extreme temperatures are. Thermal compression could crucially change surface profile and decrease the quality of the mass spectrometry measurements.
The goal of the research is to conduct a thermomechanical analysis of the 3D printed metal Kingdon ion trap, for the conditions of the Moon surface. At this point, we have created the prototype by inkjet printing techno logy, performed thermal expansion analysis and tests.
Results show that the thermal expansion could significantly affect the performance of the instrument. We are proposing to introduce corrections to the shape of the surface.
